


the white knight is the king’s shadow

by ninemoons42



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Abandonment, Absent Parents, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Magic, Anal Sex, Antagonist Death, Archery, Armor, Backstory Death, Barebacking, Battle Strategy & Tactics, Blow Jobs, Character Death, Coronation, Detachment, Escape, F/M, Familial Abuse, Fighting Side by Side, Fingerfucking, First Kiss, First Time, Gen, Healing, Holding Hands, Inspired by Music, Kings & Queens, Knights - Freeform, M/M, Magic Not Mutation, Magical Bonds, Mental Instability, Mercy Killing, Mind Control, Minor Character Death, Narrow Escapes, Oaths & Vows, Oral Sex, PTSD, Parent Death, Past Abuse, References to Abuse, References to Chess, Running Side by Side, Sleep, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Sparring, Swords & Sorcery, Training, Unable to Sleep, War, Wilderness, fugue state, runaways - Freeform, self-injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-08
Updated: 2013-04-24
Packaged: 2017-12-07 21:31:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 25,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/753289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Warrior-Prince Erik has suffered a string of defeats and is well on his way to heading home in disgrace. As he drags the shattered remnants of his battle group onwards, his path crosses that of a powerful, untrained outcast of a magic-user - and Erik quickly learns that there are no accidents in life. </p><p>Especially not in <i>his</i> life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. first promise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This is a universe that grew out of the five-sentences ficlet I wrote here: [a circle of protection](http://ninemoons42-five-sentences.tumblr.com/post/47013230463/assuming-that-this-is-an-actual-production-photo). Apparently I'm actually creating the entire world now, instead of just showing a glimpse of it as it descends into war.]
> 
> Please be warned for certain discussions pertaining to dubcon/noncon themes - not of the sexual kind but of the magical kind.

The two suns are well on their way to kissing the distant horizon, contrastingly gentle lovers’ benedictions to the baked earth and the choking air, and Erik lurches forward through the forest and its blasted blackened trees - he can hear the ground cracking with each step, and he can hear how the remnants of his battle group are falling behind him. Too much blood lost. Too much mana ripped away. Too many weapons broken.

It’s a wonder that he’s managed to hang on to his own sword - but then again, it is _his_ , something he calls forth from his own flesh and blood, and so perhaps it will be something that he cannot ever lose, not so long as he has breath to draw.

But what good is a sword if he cannot even be alive to summon it?

“Warrior-Prince,” someone whispers behind him. 

Slowly Erik turns, and the woman dressed in white is on her knees. Her hands are lit up with ghostly blue fire, shimmering iridescent across her skin and across her strange black-in-black eyes. All others fear her; Erik walks fearlessly at her side. She is his mentor, and she is his second-in-command, though the soldiers cringe away when he passes orders to her and she cries them out in a loud powerful voice.

She coughs and very nearly topples forward. It is all Erik can do to move towards her, to catch her before she hits the ground. He, too, is drained, nearly to the utmost limits of the immense strength that he has. 

He’s been in too many battles. They both have been. Now they are on their last legs.

“What do you see?” he rasps. “Are our enemies lying in wait? Is there danger?”

“Someone is coming,” she says.

Erik curses, once, and holds out his right hand. The words come slowly and painfully - but speak them he must. _By suns and stars and the red moon of war -_

He holds out his right hand in the direction of the setting suns. His blood sings in his veins, and it should have been a song of power, a song of triumph, but there is little left of him.

Still he can feel the magic moving in him; still he can feel his strength, and the focus that has carried him this far shapes that strength into the edges of the sword, into the blood-red guard and pommel - 

“Stop,” the woman says.

“Why,” Erik says. “We are in danger.”

“Yes, we are,” she says weakly. “All are in danger - but all will be lost if you meet what is coming with bared blade.”

Erik hates that he has to cringe, because the magic bleeds out of him exactly like knives digging into his flesh. “So am I to roll over and bare my throat to death? What for am I Warrior-Prince?”

“What is coming will save you and will protect you and will lead you to your grave,” the woman says.

“I have been walking toward my grave every day of my life,” Erik hisses. “It is where I will go on my last day. Has that day come?”

Instead of answering, the woman points into the trees - and then her finger moves, up and up and up, toward the crowns of branches, until the last rays of light shatter and catch on the man standing on high, watching over them.

“I know who you are,” the stranger says.

Erik watches in silent incredulity as the man leaps the unimaginable distance down, and lands lightly on his feet.

“Hail, Witch-Mistress,” the man says. “Hail, Warrior-Prince.”

“Hail to one who is yet untitled,” the woman in white whispers. “Hail to one who is come into his own.”

The man steps soundlessly towards them and offers a waterskin in Erik’s direction. 

The falling night does not obscure the constellations of freckles and scars on the man’s bared throat and arms, though it lingers in the blue of his eyes, deep and strange.

Erik shakes his head. “She needs it more than I do.”

“You’re not wrong,” the man says, “but you’re not all right.”

That almost startles a laugh out of Erik. “Yes.”

The woman drinks thirstily, long rapid gulps until she nearly throws the more than half empty skin back in its owner’s direction. 

“If you want more,” the man offers.

“No. See to the Warrior-Prince,” she says. “What I have taken will have to be enough for me.”

“You need your strength - ” Erik starts.

“And I will need yours. So _drink_.”

Reluctantly Erik takes the container of water. His fingers brush against shockingly warm skin. 

“You have almost scorched me,” Erik says between gulps. “So you’re the danger. Who or what are you?”

The man smiles. “Danger. Yes. I have been called that before. But I believe I am here because I have been sent here.”

“You believe - ?”

“He is that which you have been looking for,” the woman in white says. “Your ambitions reach the sky and the suns.”

“So? There is still a White Knight. The traitor who raised me is still alive, and with him, his loyal sword.”

She smiles, and for the first time she seems restored. The fire in her hands reaches eagerly for the rest of her, limning her in soft light, startling beacon, dangerous. “This man is here because that sword has been broken. Only one White Knight can exist at a time in the world. One has fallen, so another takes his or her place.”

The man raises his eyebrows at her. “White Knight. I see. How strange. I have been called many things, but every name seems to have been some kind of pejorative. This one seems new.”

“I have had the same experience as you,” Erik says - and then he blinks. He does not know why he spoke up.

The woman in white smirks, and does not bother to hide it.

“If I am to be a White Knight,” the man says, “you must know what I can do.”

Before Erik can react, the stranger takes a deep breath.

There is a soft roar all around them like leaves on trees, though the branches all around them are bare and brittle and broken.

Something begins to pound in the earth beneath their hands and knees and feet - a powerful pulse, insistent, relentless.

The trees around them spring to life, putting out leaves and buds and fruit in the space of mere moments. The rich scent of sap hangs in the air, undercutting the cloying fragrances of the falling flowers.

As for the man himself, he shows no outward sign of what he has wrought - until he opens his eyes to reveal blue ringed in silver. “I have always been like this,” he says. Slowly his left hand comes up to point at the bridge of his own nose. He still sounds like he is only carrying on in an ordinary conversation. “I did not know that there was some kind of sign in it.”

“It would have meant nothing,” the woman in white says, “had the Warrior-Prince not come into his own, and become ready to be a King. A White Knight does not exist without someone for him or her to swear allegiance to. And he or she can only swear to a King, whosoever that King might be.”

“I understand there have been women who were given the title of King,” the stranger says.

“Yes,” she answers.

“So now my testing is over,” Erik says after a few more moments, interrupting the other two in their conversation. He looks up to the sky where the thousand stars whirl in their serpentine paths, where the distant red moon hangs far away in the south: a portent of dry dusty days and long barren nights.

“Do not take your loss to heart, Warrior-Prince,” the woman in white says. “You will be able to conquer now....”

“He can still refuse,” Erik says. To the stranger, he adds, “I do not know what you know of White Knights and the bonds that they must have with their Kings.”

“I know very little of that. I have had no time to learn such things,” is the subdued reply. “Everything I owned has been taken from me.”

“Then you should know that I am not the man who raised me,” Erik says. “When his White Knight was sent to him, he _forced_ the man to grovel at his feet, and made him say his vows with a knife at his throat. I will do no such thing. I have passed my testing and that is all.”

“Have a care, Warrior-Prince,” the woman in white warns. “You know what lies ahead for you, and you should know that you must have a White Knight or else you shall be lost.”

“Not even that will be sufficient cause for me to take a White Knight’s vow by force.”

“Perhaps you should ask me,” the stranger says, “for it seems to me that right now you are forcing your opinion upon us.” His smile is small and slight and silvered in the night and in his power. “You will not know what I wish unless you ask.”

“You must ask, Warrior-Prince,” the woman says. “It is how these things go.”

Erik divides his glower between the two of them - and then he sighs and shakes his head and calls his weapon out, bears his blade from his body - from his own sinews and his own sweat.

The stranger looks impressed.

Erik turns the sword around so that its point is at his own heart, so that the hilt is pointed at the stranger. “King I am to be of this land. But not even a King can completely conquer its evils and its enemies and its perils. I cannot walk my chosen path alone.

“Your path has crossed mine and you are the one who has been called to stand at my side. You have been called to serve your King and your land. You are the White Knight - will you swear to me? Will you fight with and for your King?”

When Erik looks up again at the stranger he seems crowned in the distant stars and the distant moon; silver light playing in his eyes and at the tips of his dark unruly hair. 

He cannot help but hold his breath as he waits for the man to respond: he must take Erik’s sword and set it alight in order to initiate their bond.

The woman in white watches over him and over this man who could be a White Knight, and her eyes are hooded and inscrutable and filled with strange shadows.


	2. dark drops

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be warned for references to past abuse, including but not limited to physical and mental battery.

The very air groans around him, the voice of the world choked in pain and in anger, and wrapped in that hideous cry is a voice singing and shouting defiance. Hoarse words. Ancient melody. 

Charles feels something in him respond to that strange new song, something completely unknown to him: it feels like the song is pulling at him. It insists. It is inexorable.

_By suns and stars and the red moon of war I take the battle and the victory that is mine, won by my own hands, paid for with my blood, with my heart and my strength!_

And in the next moment the song is as familiar to him as the erratic rasp of his every breath - enough that he thinks about wanting to sing the countermelody that must exist, for the song that he hears is stirring and urgent, and he knows songs that are slow and inexorable and gradual - and that are no less powerful than this.

He blinks and stumbles forward, and he opens his eyes just in time to see the face of an enemy soldier, half-covered in a dark mask with a strange red sheen; he moves his hand and bends and dips, and the man falls away from him and is silent, breaking as he slumps to the ground.

He can smell smoke and salt and the gritty bitterness of the earth churning beneath his feet - and why is the earth churning? Why is everything around him outlined in a strange silver light? The skin of his left wrist chafes. His arms are bared and raised and moving - he can catch glimpses of something moving, or something that he is moving, and enemy soldiers whirl up to him and just as rapidly fall away.

There is a pulse in Charles’s fingertips that isn’t his, and yet it seems to belong to him, for his heart responds to that pulse and beats steadily alongside it. The silver light is edged in many places with red, a familiar red. Has he created that red or has it been presented to him? He remembers a pommel shaped like a man’s fist and a cross-guard with scrolled ends. A grip that was still rough despite the grooves worn into it by the hands of its owner. 

A long blade, straight and true. Light shattering off the sharp edges, throwing off sparks. Charles only needs to turn his head to see more of those sparks, flying together with the notes of the song that he can still hear so clearly.

There are other lights in the strange fog that surrounds his every movement: rapid flashes of swift darkness. Every time he sees one of those flashes he can hear someone scream. Darkness edged in iridescent blue flame, beautiful and powerful and terrifying.

He dances, or he feels like he must be dancing: he moves back and forth over the ground that shifts restlessly beneath his feet to the pulse of the song or to the pounding rhythm of his heart, and he runs into obstacles, some of which are moving. Toward him or away from him - it doesn’t matter, because he can feel himself giving chase, and he can feel resistance when he moves his hands.

His hands? He doesn’t always remember what he is carrying around with him, and that is part of his curse and that is part of his strength. The power that courses through him is immense, but he cannot always find it. It eludes him, some days, and he has almost died over and over again for his failure to reach for it when he needs it. As a consequence he needs something that he cannot lose, and too many times that something has been a weapon. 

Lost or stolen or bargained for, and very seldom freely given, for who in their right minds would take in one so wild and so battered? Who would take in one who carries his scars so openly? He does not even need to look at his own hands to know how they have been nearly destroyed so many times. 

He remembers hammer blows and he remembers needles pricking at his palms. Steel being drawn down each finger until his hands were covered in blood, until he could no longer weep because the pain was too much a part of him. The terrible sweet scent of smoldering ashes laid on him, until his mouth was watering and he had lost the breath to scream.

Charles doesn’t know why he’s still alive; he only knows that he exists, and that he must wander. There are no places where he can linger; there are only places from which he must move on, and he is always finding himself in places that he has never known before and will likely never know again.

He remembers walking into the forest and climbing up before falling down: something lives in these trees, something is entrenched here and does not take kindly to newcomers seeking shelter blindly. 

Vaguely, as though the fights take place in the distant shadows between what is and what is not, he remembers fighting to stay alive. Shadows screeching at him, lashing out with claw and wing and tooth, beating him away.

Until those things, too, had fled, to the screams of men and women and to the blood falling like rain onto the dark ground that soaked it all up mindlessly.

The man in that battle is the man singing now, Charles thinks, and he blinks blurry eyes and lashes out with the silver fire of his strength, searing away a desperate wedge of desperate men bearing down on the singer with his sword, and on the woman fighting at his side.

The names and the titles fall slowly back into his mind: Warrior-Prince. Witch-Mistress. The woman is an adept of opposition. Cold logic manifesting as furious flame. 

The song: he knows the song and he knows its countermelody. But why does he know? What has he done? Red flash again in the corner of his vision. 

Charles lashes out, thoughts fleeing. All he wants is - 

What does he want?

“...Stop!”

That voice. That power. That strength.

Charles stops, and his knife is edged faintly in living red, in living sweat: flesh and bone beneath steel.

The man is here. Warrior-Prince. “Erik,” he says, after a long moment. The name is strange and new and good, though he doesn’t know how he could call it so.

Erik takes a deep breath, and is still looking at him. “Charles,” he says. “White Knight.”

Charles blinks. He knows what that title is. He knows that it is _his_ title. He remembers how he obtained it. “I swore to you.”

“You had said all but the final words when we were attacked,” Erik corrects him. “You broke off and drew your knives and began to scream.”

The woman draws near. The waterskin in her hand is not like his, and when she offers it and he puts it to his lips he knows why. Wine that tastes like oak and like strange flowers melting on his tongue. “Hail, White Knight,” she says softly. 

“I did not complete the oath,” Charles says.

“That does not matter. You are the White Knight.”

“You saved my life when you attacked without warning,” Erik says. “You leapt to your feet and sank your knives into the heart of the woman who was about to shoot me with her crossbow.”

“Poisoned quarrels,” the woman whispers. “A terrible death, and a painful one.”

“There is one other piece of proof, if you wish to find it,” Erik says, and he pulls up the sleeve of his tunic. 

There is a thin black band spiraling around his right wrist: a plain solid line that seems to grow darker the longer Charles stares at it.

“Yours has already manifested, as well.”

Charles looks at his wrists. The left one had felt chafed during the battle; now he knows why, for now he carries the same black spiral as Erik.

“That will grow the longer you stay alive - _together_ ,” the Witch-Mistress says. “Perhaps it will cover your respective arms completely. Perhaps it will become something beautiful, like dark jewels laid into your skin. Only time will tell. That marking is the symbol of your partnership, and it will change and grow as - if - you do.”

“You have questions,” Erik says.

“As I have mentioned earlier,” Charles says, “I know nothing save that White Knights exist. I do not know about their duties and responsibilities. I do not know if they have any freedoms; all I know is that you yourself have insisted that there must be something of the sort.”

He watches as the Witch-Mistress slants a look at Erik; she looks calm and seems steady, but there are lines of determination and caution tightening around her strange eyes.

“I will speak to you of White Knights, and answer your other questions,” the King-to-be says, “if you will just tell me one thing.”

“If it is in my power,” Charles says.

“I hope that it is, because I want to know how you came to be a fighter. How you learned to do all the things that you have just done.” 

Charles looks sharply at Erik - and finds surprise written all over his face. “I fight in order to survive. That is what I know.”

“It is hard to describe what I saw just now,” Erik says, nearly over the end of Charles’s words. A hoarse voice full of grave concern. “You spoke to us earlier, seeming placid and calm. And that was what remained with you even as I watched you slit several throats in rapid succession and then grapple with someone for the hammer that he planned to break your skull with.”

Charles blinks. “I do not remember anything.”

“Not the part where you _tore_ swords and spears from the enemies’ hands? Not the part where you slashed someone open from collar to belt and ducked away from the spraying blood? Not the part where you broke a man’s nose with the palm of your hand and then slashed his eyes out?”

He doesn’t remember; or if he does remember, he remembers them as things that happened to other people, not as things that he himself has done. “Forgive me; I know you are speaking of these things because you must have seen them happen. But I have no memory of it. I remember swearing to you, and I remember not being able to finish the oath. Now I remember drinking wine here with the two of you. The rest is as nothingness to me.”

“He is telling the truth,” the woman says. 

“So it is as you feared,” Erik tells her.

“I did not speak of fear,” she says. “I spoke out of concern. This is something that you will need to overcome, together.”

“What are you talking about?” Charles asks.

“You were here and you were not here, during the fight,” is her answer, after a long moment of looking out at the dead and the dying - men and women sprawled out at their feet. “And you are used to this, because you are not attacking us, nor are you saying that we speak falsely against you.” 

“I suppose so.”

“This matters not to me,” Erik suddenly says to the woman. “The bond exists, or it does not. You can see with your own eyes that it does.”

“You did not wish a White Knight earlier,” she says. “Now you defend this one.”

“He has proven that he is as good as his word. More than. Even with the ritual cut short.”

“And you do not worry that your White Knight is half broken?”

Silence falls like a thunderclap.

Charles has been called _broken_ before. He’s heard it over and over again.

The pain of it is still sharp in his spirit.

“I, too, was a broken Warrior-Prince,” Erik suddenly says.

“...Yes,” the Witch-Mistress says. “Yes, you were. I remember. So we will begin from this if we must. Because we must. We have little time remaining - we are almost within the borders.”

“Borders,” Charles repeats.

Erik smiles, but there is nothing of mirth in it - only a sharp grimness. “Almost home.”


	3. three: the faintest idea of home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be warned for references to past character deaths.

They are cresting a series of hills when the wind suddenly changes direction; it makes Erik stop and signal the other two to stop.

Charles drops easily to the ground, silent, alert - watching below as Erik watches above.

The scent on the wind makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end as he casts keen eyes over the rocky landscape. Tailing off to the horizon behind them are bits of scrub and brush scattered here and there, too low for the most part to hide potential enemies - and then he takes another deep breath, and realizes what had made him pause in the first place.

The wind carries the smell of the sea to him - familiar and strange at the same time. A smell that he thinks must be permanently lodged in his skin and in his blood by now. A smell that makes him think of eternal rhythms and immeasurable depths.

A smell that in the past used to mingle with the hot fierce rush of anger and of tears.

The woman in white looks at him with something that looks dangerously like sympathy when she catches his eye. “So you have come back to the place where you began. The circle is nearly complete,” she says, grave as midnight.

“I would give much to be able to turn my back on those waves, and never see them again,” Erik says. “There is salt enough in my blood and in my sweat and in the corners of my eyes.”

“You could do that,” she says. “But that would mean walking away from your goal.”

He very nearly laughs: it would have been a sound without mirth and without happiness, a stain on the salty breeze, had he let it escape. “I crave that goal as much as I hate it.”

She nods, once. “I know.”

“I don’t,” Charles says. “I can hear the sea, and it is a new sound; I can taste this wind, which I have never encountered before. But I cannot make heads or tails of what is going on, or of what you are talking about - all I know is that you are afraid.”

Erik gives him a small, tight-lipped smile of acknowledgement. “So you feel what I feel already.”

“I do, and acutely. It is like walking into brambles. I have done this. Once by choice.” 

“You are a strange one, White Knight,” the woman says. 

“I am.”

“I wonder that you are still standing,” Erik says, “for I am almost unmanned. This is the place where I was raised, and it is where I am always pulled back. What love I had for the waves and for the winds I have had stripped from me, because of what waits for me - for us - over those hills.”

“Have a care, Warrior-Prince,” the woman warns suddenly. “Though you have had a hard time of your battles, you are not now coming back empty-handed. Begging your pardon, White Knight.”

Charles sends her an ironic little smile. Hard lines in the corners of his mouth. “I think that right now I would prefer that the two of you talked over my head. Talk about me as though I were not here.”

“We cannot do that,” Erik says after a pause. “You must know what I am dragging you into. And I mean that with everything I have left to me right now.”

He watches as Charles wordlessly spreads his hands, and opens his mouth, though he has no idea where to begin, for there is a sordid side to the story, as well as one that is less painful.

Instead the woman speaks first: “You have come to the heart of this kingdom, to the seat of its power. To a citadel that broods over the waves and over these hills. On its throne sits an usurper.”

“A murderer,” Erik adds. “One who is deceitful and false.”

“Which means that there must be some kind of reason why he is still there,” Charles says. 

Erik swallows and squares his shoulders and tries to fight off the hatred that rises slowly, burning and catching on the back of his throat, on the tips of his fingers that move towards his sword. “Yes. He remains there because I have not yet become strong enough to remove him by main force.”

“Is that why you need me?”

“That is not the only reason,” the woman says sharply. 

“Peace, Witch-Mistress,” Charles murmurs, raising his hands placatingly. “I am a cynic, that is true. I am also true to my word. I have spoken sacred vows and I will not turn my back on them or on you. I only claim the right to be myself.”

Erik watches as his White Knight stares the woman down, until her expression matches his - even and open and honest. 

“Of course,” she says at last, nodding at them both. “That is just how it must be.”

“Then I resume,” Erik says. “And yes, eventually, I must walk the path that will lead me into direct and open conflict with that man in the citadel. But now, as galling as it is, I must be humble and I must play at subservience, for that is how I can protect you.”

Charles raises an eyebrow at him, then - a dark skeptical curve in pale skin. 

“I am unaccustomed to this,” Erik says. “I have been accused of recklessness so many times. But in this moment, that is the one thing I cannot afford.”

“The present King does not know that you have risen to take the place of the White Knight who came before you,” the woman says to Charles. “The only ones who know of you, who know who you are, are the two of us.”

When the lines in Charles’s face harden into a near-grimace, Erik has to turn away.

“So I am - what? A secret,” Charles says, sounding resigned and broken. Fear burns like banked fires in his strange eyes. 

“Only for now,” the woman says. “It is to your advantage and to the Warrior-Prince’s to be hidden. It is a temporary condition.”

Erik steps forward, and comes within a hair’s-breadth of reaching out to take the White Knight’s hand. Instead he stops himself with a supreme effort and whispers, “I will swear to you that it will be temporary, if that is what will put your mind at ease.”

“I know nothing of that,” is the near-instant reply.

But Erik can sense it as the fear slowly ebbs out of the other man, to be replaced by a resolve that is already familiar and familiarly clouded at the same time.

He needs to learn much about his White Knight.

He can only hope that he will be granted the time to learn.

“Onward, then,” the woman in white murmurs, and her words are lost in the faraway voices of the sea that calls to all of them.

*

Charles quickly learns to be grateful for the cloak that hides him from the prying eyes of the citadel - hot and stifling it might be, especially at his throat where there is a wide band of thick fur, gray spotted in white-ringed-black, but it also completely conceals his weapons and, most importantly, the inky spiral around his left wrist.

“Eyes down,” the woman in white says, but he does not need the reminder: he focuses his gaze on Erik’s feet. He follows where Erik goes, up and up a series of long slopes. Cobblestones and crystal worn smooth on the paths, polished by the men and the women and the children of this place.

Every now and then the wind changes direction, capricious and reckless, and he clutches at the cloak in order to stay out of sight.

Only when Erik slows and comes to a long and reluctant halt does Charles risk a look - forward, and then _up_.

The palace that looms over all of them is all dark spires, spiraling toward the sky. Thin fingers pointing to the clouds, surrounding five slightly squared towers. He can just make out the battlements on top and the shadows of people pacing back and forth. There are banners all over, silver-gray edged in purple - garish and out of place against the deeply weathered stone.

“Here we must part,” Erik says, and Charles slants a sharp glance in his direction.

The man who had sung with steadfast voice even as he skirted the edge of being overwhelmed in battle is now shaking.

He feels a low sick churning in his gut, not his own emotions but Erik’s: disgust and despair, threatening to overwhelm determination, and beneath it all is the ebb and flow of Erik’s magic. His sword kept at bay, barely leashed here.

The words that come unbidden to his lips are strange, but _right_ \- though he doesn’t know how he knows that. “You are only alone because we are not walking beside you. That is as nothing, truly. You know that we are at your side, the Witch-Mistress and I.”

“For as long as we choose to walk beside you,” she adds softly.

Charles steps up to Erik’s side. He doesn’t dare reach out for Erik’s hand. Instead he presses his shoulder to Erik’s arm instead - a brief connection.

“I will guide him to your quarters,” he hears the woman say. “And I will guard him there as he will guard me, until you return.”

“ _If_ I return.” Erik squares his shoulders and steps away.

There is a flash in Charles’s mind that screams _I cannot_ , brief and harsh and all-encompassing - and then he and the woman are watching Erik as he walks away.

“Quarters,” he asks once they can no longer see him climbing up to the palace.

“He does not live there, although he should,” the Witch-Mistress says.

“I think I know why,” Charles says.

“Yes, you might.”

He’s almost grateful when she turns him away from the palace with an adroit hand.

*

The higher Erik climbs into the towers the more stretched-out he feels: as if he’d left some part of him behind at the palace gates, distant flare of pain as he moves farther and farther away from what he is not actually missing, for he is hale and whole as he strides down corridor after corridor.

Doors. Locks. Dust in the corners. The lower floors are empty and the upper floors are guarded by soldiers with scarred hands and faces.

Once upon a time he knew this place to be full of people.

Once upon a time he had not known fear as he paced up and up and up, feet striking the occasional spark from the bare stone steps.

Once upon a time he had spent all of his time wishing that the times were different.

Ruthlessly he quashes the speculation that has never led him anywhere. He cannot hope, not here, not in the place where he laid all of his dreams to rest upon two empty slabs of black rock.

What little hope he knows, he does not care for here. There are other places for it. 

Not this one.

When he steps upon the purple runner that leads into the sheltered inner rooms of the keep he squares his shoulders and lifts his head high.

He would really rather not be here at all, though, if he had a choice.

He doesn’t have that.

He pushes on the last set of doors without using his hands.

There is a throne of dark wood and black crystal, and there is a man on that throne. Old and bent, gnarled and used up. Hunched over. White hair, sparse and coarse and unkempt.

Erik can see the man’s wrists: marked only with scars. Pallid skin.

The man in the throne looks up and throws him a contemptuous glance. “What are you doing here,” he says, rough reedy whisper. “I expected you to come back a corpse.”

“I’m still alive,” Erik says, and though he’s said those words a hundred times he is still amazed when he can say them without losing his nerve, without tipping his hand. When he can say them and they come out perfectly cold and perfectly detached. “Uncle.”

The man curses Erik softly and violently for a long minute.

Erik musters the strength to smile at him - difficult on most days.

Today, however, there is a sudden spark of surprise in the back of his mind. It puts him in mind of a glimpse of the stars in a bitterly wind-tossed night, and he cannot help but feel true pleasure, something that shakes him to the very nerves and bones, bright crackling silent.

*

The armory is nearly an afterthought to the main guard house, and it is empty except for the two of them.

Charles knows the incredulity shows on his face, and shakes his head. “Why would I accept that? Why should I?”

“You do need to hide your wrist now,” the Witch-Mistress says.

It is a little irritating that she sounds so calm and reasonable.

The vambraces in her hands are very nearly plain: flash of copper, thin beaten contrasting threads laid delicately into the matte flat metal. “The Warrior-Prince wore those a long time ago. He’s outgrown them now.”

Reluctantly Charles takes the armor, turns each piece around and around in his hands. The hinges do not squeak, and the inner surfaces are still well-oiled.

They fit him perfectly.


	4. slow fall

The little house is several minutes’ brisk walk away from the forbidding gates to the castle with their crests and their banners, and from the little armory that they had been directed to: Charles can hardly keep up with the Witch-Mistress, who slides through the crowds noiselessly and rapidly. Everyone seems to sense her coming and everyone makes room for her stride, and no one looks at her even when she is a bright and obvious flash of movement.

People in gray and in green and in dark blues. No one seems to be wearing anything bright or flowery, not the women in their somber skirts nor the children as they chase each other and stumble over the cobblestones in various stages of undress. Clean faces, but not a smile among them; everywhere spotless and sterile, and even the walls of the houses that face away from the sea are scrubbed clean.

“There are no flowers here,” Charles murmurs despite himself.

The woman in white looks at him, brief and sharp and comprehensive glance, and turns away just as quickly. “Salt,” she says, and the wind tosses her pale flaxen curls around her face, and she impatiently swipes stray strands away from her mouth. “We are too close to a sea that is too wild.”

“There must have been some reason why people even live here.”

“If you had no other place to run to, if danger and death pressed in on you from all sides, you would be tempted to turn to a shelter that is inhospitable. To a home that is no real home.”

Charles eyes her in his turn. “Are you talking about this place, or about someone, or about a story? I cannot tell.”

She laughs, but the chiming sweetness quickly vanishes as she does, when she turns right and abruptly plunges into a warren of narrow alleys.

Had he not lived in places where a misstep would mean being completely swept off one’s intended path, he thinks he would never have been able to keep up with her darting steps: up one lane and down another, zig-zagging irregularly up and down the rocky slopes of the city, until she finally steps up to a rough-hewn door, almost as dark as the smoky-gray brick of the walls that rise over them, forbidding, far too close.

“Here,” she says, and she produces a key from her sleeve, rusted and crooked and fitting perfectly into the lock on the door.

She pushes the door open with a small grunt of effort, and waves him in.

As he crosses the threshold he looks back over his shoulder, and though his eyes are sharp enough to catch her fingertips skimming in a deliberate pattern on the jamb he does not actually know what she is doing.

When the door closes all he hears is a sharp click that echoes again and again around the bare space in which they have found themselves.

The Witch-Mistress points delicately to the corners of the room, and Charles hears a soft sizzle and hiss as flames spark to life within sturdy, serviceable lamps. Smokeless clear light, dispelling the gloom, revealing the house.

One wall is almost completely taken up by a sprawling hearth and a chimney; there is kindling laid in a neat pile around a hulking log, larger around than Charles’s midsection. The pots and pans look well-maintained, even if some of them are dented around the edges. Iron rods of various shapes and sizes in a stack next to the fireplace; he thinks one of those items must be a poker and doesn’t know what the rest are for.

Tables and shelves run along the next wall of the room, with books and plates and crockery scattered willy-nilly. A battered kettle and a handful of mismatched cups, some of them glazed and some of them painted. There is a sprig of something dry hanging from the top of the frame in which there is a single hazy pane of glass; he thinks it must have had some kind of color in the past, but now it is just one more dark thing in a house full of them. 

Books and parchment piled around his feet: haphazard stacks and flat baskets all shoved roughly together, and dust on every exposed surface.

Behind him is the bed: small and narrow, its frame seemingly lashed together by ropes. A pile of wrinkled blankets and beaten cushions. 

“I know I must have lived in humbler conditions than this,” Charles suddenly says as he unlaces his heavy cloak. “But I cannot now remember what those other places must have been like.” To the woman as she sits down next to the still-dark hearth, he adds, “Is his title merely a courtesy? Does it mean nothing at all?”

“He truly is of the blood royal, if you are asking me about his lineage,” she says, and crosses her feet at the ankles. “The Warrior-Prince can trace his ancestry back to the very founders of this settlement.”

He moves aside a handful of books and sits down on the floor, almost directly beneath the window; the cloak becomes almost comfortable when he uses it as a makeshift cushion. “So he is here because he wishes to say something.”

Unexpectedly, the woman smiles at him - and her expression actually looks like it might be genuine. “Do you think you might know what that message is?”

Charles takes a deep breath and looks inside himself - and for the first time he deliberately looks at the bond - at the way it trembles now. There is a limitless anger that seethes silently in him - and it isn’t his but it feels so familiar in the way that it’s buried so deep, and kept on a very tight and very short rein. “It has to do with the reason why he looked so angry when we left him.”

“Yes.” Another comprehensive glance, and she points to one of the books next to him: dark red binding, traces of gilt on the edges of the pages. Worn and cracked: it looks like it’s been handled over and over again. “Family histories. Most of the stories have to do with the Warrior-Prince’s ancestors,” she says before she gets to her feet. “Perhaps that will occupy you for a while, or perhaps you might decide to rest. We have been in battle after all. I will go and get food.”

“I’ll go with you - ”

She shakes her head. “Stay here.”

Anger flares up in him, suddenly - something that belongs to only him. “I do not wish to be a prisoner.”

“Now you know how he feels,” she snaps back. The words are at odds with the spark of something that looks like sympathy in her eyes.

Charles goes silent, then, and he ignores both the emotions that aren’t his and the very real feeling of suffocation that wraps its cold clammy fingers around his throat.

Eventually the woman in white leaves the bread and the cheese and the fruit that she brings back on the chair that she had been sitting in next to the fireplace; she exits the house in silence, and when she mutters something at the door as she goes out, he pays her no mind - though he has to blink away the afterimage of light when whatever she does causes the door frame to glow, briefly, brightly, blindingly. Blue shadows dancing in his eyes as he tries to shake his light-drunkenness off.

Hunger and thirst are easy to ignore. Solitude is something he is used to.

Darkness is something he craves, which is why after he’s sure he’s alone he gets up and snuffs out three of the lanterns, leaving only the dimmest one, the one that is furthest away from him. Its dim light just barely illuminates the door and the entry way.

What is new to him is the increasing awareness of the Warrior-Prince - of Erik - who feels unsettled. Charles receives brief impressions of firelight flashing off a confusing array of weapons. A spear-point longer than both of his hands put together atop a staff made of black wood, the grain picked out in a startling gray. Daggers of every possible shape and size - one blade is as thin as a needle while another sports not a sharp edge but a wicked series of barbs. A war-hammer, a flail on a chain painted gold, a cat-o’-nine-tails with too many knots.

Erik feels angry, and moves in distant motions, as though uncoordinated, and Charles has no choice but to feel the knotting in his shoulders, the tension in his wrists.

Even when he stretches out on the cloak and rolls himself up in its loose ends to keep warm, he still feels torn in two, unable to rest.

He’d tried to reach out to the other man before. The brief connection between them - and then and now he feels something sear through him, shocking and true and welcome.

It is only when he can catch his breath that he notices that Erik, too, has reacted to that: for the spark of awareness that belongs to the Warrior-Prince is still and startled.

Charles has heard tell of peace, of people who live within serenity, their footsteps and their hands guided by certainty and knowledge; he only knows these things from stories, and from watching others. These are things that he has never experienced for himself, and that cannot possibly have a hold on him.

Which means that he has no way of knowing what has just happened, of how there is a feeble trembling image of strange new _quiet_ in him and in Erik.

*

He’d come down through the citadel at most of a run after the audience with his uncle. Hate like claws digging into his flesh, reaching into the soft parts of him, attempting to tear at him anew. So much fiercer and so much darker than it had ever been, when he had normally nursed it as he would a banked fire, properly concealed.

The doors to the smithy crashing open with the sheer force of his will. Restlessness stalking him and making him stalk around the room in its turn. 

Fighting invisible enemies. Taking up weapon after weapon and flinging them down when they were done, heedless of the danger he was to himself and to others who might come in after him.

The days are running down, and soon he will have to wake up to another shadow moon, hairline red crescent in the sky - the moon that had hung over the palace on the night his family had been killed.

He’s almost lost count of the years, and yet he is haunted by imaginary faces torn asunder in blood and in hatred, making him wake up in the mornings with a weapon of some kind in his hand.

Now he works the cat-o’-nine-tails with frenzied speed. He knows it when the knots bite into his skin and leave behind dark welts, but not even that can stop him. The opposite is happening: he whirls even more into the madness of it, blood singing in his veins, enough that his power is calling to everything that surrounds him and he can feel every note that responds to him, dagger and chain and axe and arrow.

The room is getting warmer and warmer, and the salt of his sweat stings against the wounds left in him by the whip in his hands. 

His awareness of Charles runs high and hot in the blood - Charles in darkness, Charles curled in on himself - but the image that halts him is no image at all. Rather, he gets a reflection of his own thought, of his own desire to reach out to the man who is now his White Knight - and hard on its heels is Charles’s own image, the faint pressure of sleeve against sleeve, shared warmth, shoulders to help bear the enormous unnameable burden.

The cat clatters to the floor as Erik takes a deep breath, and another, and then walks out the door.

The streets are empty, when he emerges from the citadel; most windows are dark. The wind has changed direction and is now blowing toward the sea. He can smell fire and food and dirt and ash.

Erik can hear his own footsteps as he runs down cobbled streets shrouded in shadow.

The door to his house is warded, and he knows whose hands placed that ward; he whispers the countersign and is rewarded by movement.

Inside all is still and dark - still Erik’s footsteps are sure and unhurried as he crosses the tiny space to the heap of cloth and dark hair underneath the window, in which there hangs a sprig of black rue, long since dried.

Charles in his cloak is warm and quiet, and Erik can hear him breathing, feel him shifting minutely as he falls more deeply asleep.

When Erik sits down on the floor Charles’s warmth and weight and whispers hang heavily on his senses, pulling him in and closer, though they are nowhere touching.

* 

When he wakes the sun struggles to illuminate the room, and someone is holding his hand.

Charles looks at Erik, sleeping, unguarded, and doesn’t let go.


	5. call to arms

Erik starts awake from incoherent dream-fragments - he thinks he must have been holding a knife in his hands, and he knows that his was not the only hand that held on to that knife as it flashed down - and in the process, he pulls away from the soft firm pressure wrapped around his hand.

“I had not realized that you were still so easily startled,” the woman in white murmurs as she crooks her fingers at the door at her back, making it move and swing back towards its frame, to a smooth stop and a quiet _thump_.

“I had not expected to see you again,” Erik says, letting his surprise show. “We have returned to this place, now. You were free to leave as soon as we came to the foot of the citadel.”

She smiles, a little rueful and a little amused. “I will not deny that I have been wishing to leave. That I am being pulled away. But it did not seem prudent to depart without so much as letting you know.”

“I had not realized that you wished to stand on ceremony.”

“I may be growing older,” the woman murmurs.

“Please, continue to speak in riddles; I am not here.”

Erik is still not used to hearing that soft, wry voice, which might explain why he looks quickly around for the speaker.

Charles is sitting less than an arm’s-length away, cross-legged on the cloak from their arrival. He is turning a book over in his hands - and another jolt of surprise snaps through Erik when he recognizes the red leather and the creases around the corners.

He knows the book by heart and yet goes back to reading it on the nights that he cannot sleep, so much so that he knows exactly what the leather feels like to his fingertips. 

Charles’s fingertips are arresting against the dent halfway down the volume’s spine.

“Perhaps you might say that I am tied to another,” the woman in white is saying when Erik blinks and returns to the conversation. “My beloved and I are not precisely bonded the way that you and the Warrior-Prince are, but we are linked together just the same.”

Charles nods. “I see. Is your beloved from this place?”

“Yes and no. She keeps a dwelling a day’s journey down the coast from here, but it is only one of the many places where she can lay her head down at night. She is happier when she can be unfettered, you see; the dwellings of men are no comfort and no solitude to her. So she is not here, and today I will make my way down to that place, and hope that she is still there.”

“And if she isn’t?”

The woman in white laughs briefly. “Then I will not be able to rest yet, for I must find her. We have been parted for too long, though I also understand that this is through no fault of ours.” 

Erik shrugs, one-shouldered, when she gestures in his direction. “You will still convey my regrets to your lady. Tell her that I did everything in my power to bring you back sooner.”

“I know this, Warrior-Prince, and so does she.”

He gets to his feet, then, and walks toward her - but he also catches a brief glimpse of a frown on Charles’s face as he moves away. “Then I will detain you no longer. Go, with my thanks.”

She smiles again, but only for a moment. “If only I could have done better, then you would still have many of your men surrounding you. You will need loyalty and strength in the coming days.”

“I seem to have done well with your strength,” Erik says as he takes her hand and brushes a kiss over the knuckles. “And I do not need to question your loyalty.”

“You have it, Warrior-Prince - you have the loyalty that I can freely give.”

“And that for me is sufficient - Emma,” he says. He does not often say her name, but it seems right to do so now.

“Thank you,” she says, and then she murmurs for his ears alone. “Loyalty and strength you will have if you will treat your White Knight well, Erik.”

“I can only do what I can,” Erik says just as quietly.

“Call on me if you should need me,” are Emma’s final words - and then she steps back out, and the sunlight reflected off her cloak blazes brightly in the room for a heartbeat.

Erik turns back to the other man in the room once he’s double-checked and re-secured the locks on the door.

Now Charles is standing next to the window. There is just enough space between the window and the shelves to fit his frame. Spare, lean, scarred in some places where his bare skin is still showing bloodstains from the journey.

Erik blinks when he sees the vambraces. “She found those for you?”

“Yes. Before we came here she took me to an armory, and she told me to use these to hide the marking.” He gestures to his left wrist. “This is the first time that I have worn anything like this.”

Erik thinks of the armor, and of Emma’s words, and speaks as carefully as he can, though he still sounds clumsy to his own ears: “If you would rather not wear the armor, perhaps I can find you something with sleeves instead. I would speak with the weavers and provide you with something you might find preferable.”

“It’s kind of you to say so. If I should run into problems with these vambraces, I will let you know.”

“All right,” Erik says, and he looks around for food - and eventually he settles for the bread and cheese near the table. “Have you eaten?”

Charles shakes his head. “No. I am not hungry at present.” 

“You will have to eat at some point.”

“I am used to being hungry.”

Erik waves a crust in his direction. “You do not have to be.”

“Why do you feel that you need to take care of me?”

Erik looks up from the crumbs dotting the table - and feels everything go still.

Charles seems to wear many of his emotions openly - Erik remembers rage and amusement and fear and solemnity, all within the first few days of their acquaintance alone. Now, though, he looks _torn_ , and incongruously young, for all that there are lines in his face that do not seem to come from combat or feelings alone, and for all that there is a faint silvering in his hair.

Whatever it is that shivers between them does so now with things that Erik distantly remembers: the approach of something unknown. Something that could be good and something that could hurt at the same time. It is not unlike the feeling he’d had when he’d first taken up the sword, trepidation making his fingers close convulsively upon scabbard and grip. It makes him think of the fear that had lashed at him after he’d come into the fullness of his magic - the powers of war unleashed within him, and contained by him.

He thinks back to a gruff woman, old before her time. Not precisely his commander, and no one Erik could call a subordinate. He remembers the great scar on her back, proof that she’d walked through fire and survived the ordeal. He remembers how people came to her for advice, and how she always turned her back on anyone she wished to tell the truth to.

So he shifts around in the chair until he cannot even see Charles out of the corner of his eye, and bows his head to speak. “Do you wish me to ignore your existence? Would it suit you if I treated you harshly? I am not known for doing those things, but I will do them if you ask me to.”

“These are the things that I am used to,” Charles says, but he sounds uneasy, now. 

“I wish that I could tell you that I sympathize.”

“...You’re telling me the truth.”

“Of course I am,” Erik says. “I have no reason to tell you lies.”

“You’re only saying that because of the bond.”

“That is not how it works, Charles. I wish I could convince you otherwise.”

The brief silence that falls is broken by a quiet rustling, by a footstep coming closer. 

Between them, something shakes and falls softly into place.

Faint warmth. Faint presence. Erik moves without thinking about moving, and though he can still look straight ahead at the walls of his own house he knows that he is now also oriented in Charles’s direction. “Would it help you to think about trusting me,” he asks after a moment, “if you asked me questions? If I can tell you some things about myself?”

“And in return must I tell you something?”

“Only if you wish to,” Erik says.

He wants to say more, but he considers the sudden weight in his head that is Charles thinking, surprised and confused.

When Charles does speak the words are a fragile whisper. “I must have had a family once. Or I would not be here. I don’t remember their faces. I don’t remember their names.” There are long pauses, fraught with shadows. “Were they kind to me? Were they cruel? Did they give me my name? I - I cannot tell you anything more. That is all I have.”

“Thank you,” Erik says. “You have given me a gift. You have given me your trust. I will do what I can to earn it. So let me tell you a story.”

“A story of a citadel, and of a boy,” Charles says. 

“A story of a citadel and of a boy, and of the men and women in that citadel,” Erik says.

*

Erik’s story is - not entirely unexpected.

There are startling things to learn in it: that his mother had been commander of the citadel guards. That he’d had a sister who had succumbed to a great plague that had only been purged with fire and the combined magic of all who had the faintest spark of talent. That his father had never wanted to rule in his own right. “He was regent for his older brother, and then he was regent for me when I was born.”

“Did he fear being powerful?”

Erik smiles and keeps looking away. “I believe he simply wanted to stay among his books,” he says, sounding fond. “He was happy to have pupils, and he was happy to be home. The throne was not something he was interested in. That should have made him a good ruler, and it did - this place flourished, as much as it _could_ flourish, because he was just worried about it. He let it grow as it must.”

Charles looks out the window, and though he cannot see much, he remembers what he has seen of the city. “And yet now there are no flowers, and the children do not linger in the streets.”

What he can see of Erik’s expression darkens. “That has ever been the case here. It is as if the fear is passed down in the mother’s milk. Too many refugees, and too many stories of narrow escapes, of leaving others behind. They flee wars and terrors and hatred, and come to where we think of a locked door before we think of food or water.”

“And what of the current ruler? Can he not do anything?”

Erik’s chair creaks. “It suits him to do nothing. He has learned to like being feared. And when he had a White Knight, he used that man to reinforce that fear.”

“You want to kill him.” Charles is not asking a question.

“Eventually. I will not rush out with bared blade in hand. We must learn to work together, first. I must be with my White Knight now that he has come to me, and I must make sure that he is well.”

Charles almost bristles. “Are you trying to make a point out of being _different_ from that man....”

“That _was_ my intention. Had been. I do not think it is so now.”

Erik turns around, then, and faces him: he only seems calm. There are no lines in his face, but his hands are clenched into fists.

Charles’s feet are flat on the floor, and everything in him is tense, as though preparing to run.

“Loyalty I must have, and strength I need,” Erik murmurs after a long, tense moment. “But truth there must also be. And this is the truth that I believe in, Charles, White Knight: I cannot change by myself. I cannot bring about change by myself, either. What needs to be done, needs you as much as it needs me.

“I am not looking for a lover or for a family, and I am not going to take the place of those whom you’ve lost. I only offer myself as the one who stands by your side at this time, and I ask you only to do the same.”

There is something in Charles that is pushing at him to acquiesce, and it is more than just the bond. “And if I refuse? _Can_ I refuse?”

“I cannot do without this,” Erik says. “That means neither can you, when all else is said and done.”

“And yet you offer me a choice.”

“What choice I can offer, I will offer. It is the right thing to do. It is the truth I believe in.”

“And if I accept?” Charles almost wants to hold his breath.

“If you accept, we will leave this place tomorrow,” Erik says, thoroughly unexpected. “We will leave, and we will learn of each other, and we will learn how to work together. I do not mean that you will become an adept of the sword, nor will I take up your knives. I only mean that we must be able to use each other’s strengths. I will be your brother in arms, and you will be mine. I will learn about your abilities, and you about mine. Does this suit you?”

Charles considers Erik, and considers the bond. All this time that they have been disagreeing with each other, and yet Erik does not hate him, nor does he show any signs of wanting to send him away. Sincerity is both light and weight pouring in from Erik.

Erik is waiting for him to decide. Erik has left the decision in his hands.

He cannot run away now.

He does not want to run away.

Charles gets to his feet and crosses the short distance to Erik. “Will you need me to say the words again?”

Erik’s expression clears, a little, as he gets to his feet in turn. He towers over Charles. “If it will help you. You wish to complete the words this time.”

“Yes.”

“Then do.”

“I will walk the path you set for me. I will stand at your side. You are my King and I will serve you, and through my service to you I will serve this land,” Charles says, and his voice shakes, but he forges on. “I swear my strength and my loyalty and my truth to you. I hail you as King.”

Then he adds the words that had been cut off the first time they’d made this pledge. “I am your White Knight, now and to the end of my days.”

Erik nods solemnly. “And I will be your King, and I swear that I will not abuse the trust you’ve placed in me.”


	6. pull and pull together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Please be warned for references to execution by beheading.

“Wake up,” a voice says.

Easy to obey that when he has never been asleep to begin with.

Something pulls across his wrists as he gets to his feet: cloth tied securely into place, not too tightly, flat knots over the pulse in his wrist and just short of the crook of his elbow. The bandages he is wearing are made of soft homespun stuff, pale shade of gray against his skin, cushioning the smooth metal of the vambraces.

After going without for so long, wearing the armor now seems so easy, but he still wonders how they will affect his movement, how they will feel like when he gets into a fight. He knows what it feels like when he is moving, even though he does not always remember the faces of his foes.

Charles gets to his feet and puts his cloak back on, ignoring the look of confusion that crosses Erik’s face. 

Maybe the cloak is unnecessary, because it is warm already, so early in the morning - but Charles has entered these walls as a stranger in a cloak and if he leaves the same way, no one will remember him other than as a momentary curiosity.

That would be better than being remembered as someone suspicious, someone strange; that manner of thinking leads to getting chased out of a town, leads to escaping the headsman with just half a step to spare.

He cannot die, not now, not until he finishes the task that’s been laid on his shoulders.

He welcomes the weight of the rucksack. It settles comfortably against his back. Blankets in the bottom and foodstuffs in a neat bundle on top of that: hard bread and flat bags of dried fruit, some salted meat, a small wheel of a cheese with dark green lines scoring the rind. 

Out the door after Erik, out into the city. The thin fog of dawn swirls and eddies restlessly in their wake. Everything seems subdued, from the wan torchlight that leads to the gates, to the endless susurrus of the waves that he cannot see.

They are both armed and lightly armored; Erik has a sword strapped to his waist and a cased shortbow, unstrung. Two quivers full of arrows hang from the bottom of his rucksack. His breastplate shows signs of having been repaired and reinforced several times.

No one looks at them twice, and that is what makes Charles watch more carefully, more suspiciously.

“I’ve come and gone before,” Erik says as soon as they’re out of earshot of a troop of guards, solemn tramping that sweeps past them and does not seem to notice how encumbered they both are.

“But now you are traveling in unknown company,” Charles says quietly. “I am rather clearly not the Witch-Mistress.”

He gets a lopsided smile for that. “You would not have lived so long if you had not been watching every shadow that moves towards you.”

“It is a necessary thing, even if it tires me out,” Charles says.

“I do not mean to make sport of this or of you,” Erik says, his words becoming more solemn. “I will watch your back.”

Charles nods. “And I will watch yours. Lead on.”

*

The first time Erik catches Charles glancing over his shoulder, they are still well within bowshot of the city’s gates. 

He looks hunted and haunted, and he looks like he would like to lash out at something.

“You are not at ease within walls?” Erik ventures after the fourth time it happens, by which time they are already coming down the opposite slope of a hill.

“The last few times I was leaving a place with walls, I was running, and there were men and dogs after me,” Charles says. His eyes are trained straight ahead, and there is little to no inflection in his voice. There are shadows in his face that flutter and change with the shifting winds, with the clouds overhead. “The only reason why I know how to fight a man with an axe is because I have had to escape far too many of them.”

Erik watches as the other man’s hands close into fists and then open again.

Carefully and quietly he bears the tension in his White Knight, step after steady step. Away from the salt on the breeze, away from the seabirds and their raucous cries. 

Charles relaxes, but only a little, when they reenter the forest where their paths had first crossed.

“Tell me about forests,” Erik murmurs when they stop, long after the sun has passed its zenith. Cold water at their feet, the whispering gurgle nearly lost in the endless conversation of the trees and the wind passing through their branches. 

“Forests are more predictable than cities,” is the prompt answer. “Trees are easier to understand than people. You don’t have to know their names; you just have to know what they do. Trees provide shelter and food - and sometimes, they even provide you with weapons.” Charles picks up a branch that is longer than he is tall, gnarled and peeling in a few places. His hand barely closes around the knot near the top of the wood.

“You might want to stand back,” he hears Charles say after another moment - and Erik catches a fleeting glimpse of a slight smile on the other man’s face before he leaps away.

In Charles’s hands, the branch takes on a sudden and startling life of its own, whistling savagely through the air. He uses the entire length and breadth of it, now in one hand and now in two. With one motion he attacks and with the next he defends. 

A brief display of power. It makes Erik catch his breath.

“I have no place to call home,” Charles says, when he rises from his fighting crouch, “except for some forests, where I can lay down my head with a little less fear.”

“I will have much to learn from you,” Erik says.

Charles shrugs, and gestures with the butt end of the staff at the bow. “If in exchange you will teach me to shoot.”

“Of course.”

*

The Warrior-Prince sets a hard pace, and before Charles knows it they have walked the better part of a day and a night, until the ocean is a memory choked by dust and hushed in dry grass, until they have left even the forest and its strange whispers far behind.

From coast and forest he follows slow and steady in Erik’s footsteps, until the land begins to slope inexorably downwards, until the soil and the grass and the trees give way to bare rock, broken and jagged edges evident even through his sturdy boots.

There is no path to follow, yet Erik moves forward and down, sudden steep incline - and walking becomes running, pebbles and ground rock falling in their wake.

Charles grits his teeth and leaps forward. The heavy staff is of no use here, not without any way of knowing how treacherous the path truly is. He has no way of knowing if he’ll survive the path or break his neck on the way down. Only Erik knows - and for some reason, Charles trusts him here.

“Jump, Charles!” Erik suddenly calls.

Charles hisses in consternation, and doesn’t stop - the motion of stepping down the incline becomes the starting point of his wild leap - something narrow and dark opens at his feet, there and suddenly gone.

He lands hard enough to nearly drive him down to his knees.

But now they’re on level ground once again, and Erik is looking at him with something like concern or remorse in his eyes.

Charles curses under his breath, before squaring his shoulders and growling, “What did you just make me do?”

“Look,” Erik answers, and he points up the way they’ve just come.

Charles spins around, and stares.

Walls of rock all around them, sheer drop down, except for the path that they had followed - what little there is of it. 

“No one can get down here without knowing where that path is, and that is no safe path as you can see for yourself,” Erik says.

“And I suppose that no one can climb _out_ either, were they to blunder down this way.”

Erik shakes his head. “That is not the way out of here.”

“Well, at least you have almost caused me to break my neck in a place that should be easy to defend,” Charles growls, and he lets himself drop to the gravel at his feet, rucksack and staff and all.

“This is the safest place I know,” Erik says. “The stories say that this marks the spot where something fell out of the sky, scarring the land and shattering the sky for some time after.”

“That is not a story that I have heard,” Charles says, and again he looks around at the great bowl that they have fallen into. Dark and light layers in the rock walls, roughly blasted out. No plants, no scrub, just bare soil, and glittering crystal everywhere he looks. “But I think that I can believe that something strange did happen here.”

“No one can harm us here,” Erik says. “We would be able to watch for danger.”

“And what of water, or shelter?”

Erik smiles a little, and points at a series of dark openings in the walls. “Caves. A small river runs through one of those.”

For some reason, Charles finds himself flicking an equally brief smile back at him. “Then let us not stop here.”

*

They make a meager supper out of the bread and the cheese; Erik finds a handful of edible roots just outside of the cave where they’ve chosen to stay, and roasts those roots next to the small fire that Charles builds quickly and neatly in a small hollow lined with broken rock. 

Outside, the red moon casts a ghost-like shadowy light that is only briefly relieved by a glimpse of the second moon - the yellow moon that appears only once in a month, distant pale brightness smeared across the scudding clouds.

He is startled when Charles speaks quietly: “I have not seen the second moon in a long time.”

He thinks he ought to respond, so he murmurs, “Neither have I.”

“It’s bad luck to be born on a night when the yellow moon is visible.”

“That is not true,” Erik says.

“How do you know?”

“My mother was named for that moon, and she wed my father on a night like this.”

“I see,” is all that Charles says.

Erik gets to his feet and walks toward the back of the cave before he draws the sword that he carries at his waist. Flamelight shattering off the blade. 

He leaps into a series of forms, silent except where his blade shrieks when it strikes sparks off the walls. There is just enough room for him to turn and step and swing: he has had to learn how to fight in all kinds of close quarters. He needs to be able to kill even when he cannot use the full length of the blade. 

This is one of the things that has kept him alive all this time.

He brandishes the sword and something screams in the cave - something that is not the metal in his hands.

He blinks when something pushes back against him.

Charles is on one knee before him. 

Erik’s sword is held fast between Charles’s knives.

The bond whispers a challenge to him.

He tries to surge forward, and with a grunt Charles pushes back, keeps him in place.

“Show me your strength, Warrior-Prince,” Charles says after a long frozen instant of stalemate.

“And show me yours, White Knight,” Erik growls as he yanks his sword free and brings it back up to low guard.

The crackle of the fire is drowned out in the clash of their weapons, and the flames dance off bared blades and armor alike.


	7. forward and fight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be warned for references to, erm, _unorthodox_ first aid techniques.

_Clang. Clang. Clang._

He skitters forward. Gravel beneath his feet and the palm of one hand. Low to the ground, every muscle tensed. Sunlight flashing off the long blade in his hand. 

The sword is light and heavy at the same time and there are scratches all up and down the blade. Not a piece that had been stowed away in a chest. Not something that had been placed on a rack to be decorative. A weapon. The metal has tasted blood, slashed at bone, cut flesh into ribbons. 

He’s learning things, now. The difference between a knife and a sword. He is used to working with blades half again as long as the one he is holding in his hand now. There is a rhythm in this new weapon. The beat of his heart is different. The twist and slide of muscle is new. 

Still, he’s holding the sword. He hasn’t lost it yet, though his opponent is doing his damned best to disarm him.

Charles stays down, and rushes forward on his feet and on his hand, scrabbling rapidly over the smell of blood and salt and sweat. The bandages that he had worn on his forearms are tied lower, now, the cloth extending to protect his palms. 

His hands hurt, but distantly, as though the pain belongs to someone else who is standing aside from the here and now. A person who isn’t sparring.

Sometimes his power surges through his blood, pouring new force into his movements, making him hit harder.

Sometimes the bond flashes at him, insight, the view of a vulnerable spot or a minute break in his opponent’s defense.

Erratic. Learning. Wasted momentum, too much movement. Wielding a sword is nothing like wielding a knife, for all the two weapons resemble each other very closely, differing only in length. A different grace in the weight of a sword; a different heft in the gleam of a knife.

He’s fighting a trained soldier, a man who sleeps and breathes with his chosen weapons and armor.

Charles kicks out and explodes upwards from the ground, and he grips the sword in both hands and swings - only to be stopped.

The force of that impact should have thrown him backward, should have at the very least forced him to stop dead.

He grits his teeth through the madness that is all of his bones rattling out their complaint, and keeps pushing. He watches blades saw against each other and does not flinch away from the sparks being struck between him and his opponent.

Movement in the corner of his eye.

Charles twists away just in time to evade the fist that should have struck over his cheekbone - and somehow he finds the strength to whirl his body away, to turn his grip on his sword around, so that his counterstrike sends the pommel of the sword smashing straight for skin and bone and muscle - 

“Quarter,” a voice says.

He blinks. He knows this voice.

He’s never heard that voice say that word before.

Other sparring matches had ended naturally, at the final moment of the impasse, in whatever form it had taken: three blades crossed or two bodies locked together in defensive postures. 

He can’t really remember how long it’s been since they’ve come to this place with its sheer walls and the gurgle of water always just at the very edge of hearing. Sharp edges everywhere, loose pebbles and sand underfoot, cracked contained landscape that is shelter and prison - not the first one he has willingly entered.

Days must have passed, Charles thinks as his muscles seize and his hand trembles. He is learning how to shoot arrows. The sword in his hand is no longer a strange thing. Even the power that he can summon is slowly becoming more and more familiar, easier and easier to grasp.

Now his opponent is asking him for quarter.

Charles gives it easily - he steps away, and blinks rapidly, and the world comes back into focus.

Bright streak of red on his arm. A shallow cut. It stings a little, and he brings the wound up to his mouth and sucks until the blood stops flowing out.

Sound of rocks being further crushed underfoot as Erik stands up straight. He looks a little winded, and a little amused, though there is a large bruise rising on his jaw, dark purple and red around the edges.

“I would like to know who taught you how to hit like a mountain falling down,” the Warrior-Prince mutters, and he winces around the words and keeps smiling anyway. “And I’ve had a mountain fall down on me. Well, most of it, and it fell on me and on the people I was fighting, so I didn’t mind it until my men had to dig me out.”

Charles sheathes the sword and then holds his hands out to the other man. “Did you think that I would not require the skill, considering where you found me and how? Considering what you know about me?”

“What little of it I do know,” Erik says, nodding. “At least you could always defend yourself from all of your enemies.”

“Why I still have both hands is a mystery to me,” Charles says as he steps toward Erik. “Will you permit me to look after that?”

“Please,” is the hasty reply.

Scarred skin under Charles’s fingertips. He draws on his ability, feels the blood surge in his veins and in Erik’s. He burns briefly and fiercely, passes that heat on in a flash.

Erik grunts, pain and surprise briefly braided in the bond.

Only a small area of faint brown remains near his mouth.

“Do you feel better?” Charles asks.

“Much. Thank you. You have such an interesting gift,” Erik says. “Life itself bends the knee to you.”

Between them, the bond whispers like the sigh of a faraway sweet song. “As opposed to you, Warrior-Prince? The blade you bear within your blood brings death.”

“It also brings justice, and hope,” Erik says.

Charles smiles a little, and shakes his head. “Others must believe in you for me. I am too cynical now.”

“Perhaps it is just as well that I have learned how to live with such shadows,” is the quiet response. “Perhaps it is just as well that I have struggled past mine.”

Charles replies to that with a small shrug.

They walk back toward the cave together.

He can still hear that song between them, ablaze in the distance between their shoulders, in the intervals between his footfalls and Erik’s.

*

“That looks like it’s going to come down any moment now,” Erik hears Charles say over the rolling roar of low thunder. 

It’s more than enough reason for him to call a halt to the archery lesson. A glance to the sky and its looming heavy gray, and then a glance at Charles who is on one knee on the ground. Concentration in those blue eyes as he carefully unstrings the shortbow, as he sprints to the target and start to retrieve the arrows.

Time is passing, and they are running out of things to do.

He watches Charles run careful fingers over the shafts that he pulls from the stump that they have been using as a target, and is instantly reminded of one of their nightly rituals: tactics and strategy played out with pieces of pale and dark rock on the floor of the cave. Sometimes they reenact fights and great battles from the past, and sometimes they imagine their own; sometimes the skirmish involves a handful of soldiers and sometimes they wage a brief and mighty war against each other, each stone standing for thousands of lives.

He doesn’t always agree with Charles - he thinks he relies too heavily on hit-and-fade tactics - but he can admire the tenacity that goes hand-in-hand with Charles’s willingness to flow and shift, in the hope of changing the tide of whatever battle he’s imagining.

The storm overtakes the two of them as they’re scrambling up the slope, back to the cave, and with the drone of the crashing rain Erik thinks of men and women and of command: he thinks of finding allies.

Though he has an ally here, and he doesn’t have to ask about that.

All Erik really has to do is look at his right arm.

With the passage of the days the marking that symbolizes his bond to Charles has changed and grown, till it resembles dark vines inscribed into his skin - graceful curves tracing along vein and sinew and scar. A shape that resembles a four-petaled flower in the crook of his elbow: one unbroken line even as it describes sharp points and broad bases.

The similar shape on Charles’s skin appears on his left wrist, directly at the base of his palm.

Scrape of a footstep nearby, and Erik looks up, startled, because Charles has managed to sneak up on him.

“Here,” Charles says, and holds out the second surprise. The piece of wood in his hands is roughly shaped, but it does look like a cup, and it holds a small amount of fragrant, steaming liquid.

“So you finished the cups,” Erik says, and he does not need the bond to imagine Charles sitting next to one of their fires, slowly carving a piece of wood, night after night. “What is in it?”

“Tisane of orange flowers. It will keep you warm.”

Faint and pleasant hint of sourness on his tongue, refreshing and soothing all at once, and it seems that in the blink of an eye the cup is empty. 

“It’s good, isn’t it?” Charles asks before he raises his own cup to his lips.

“Yes,” Erik says. “However you came by that knowledge, I’m deeply grateful.”

Charles laughs softly as he goes to refill Erik’s cup. “And I suppose that once we have left this place you will want me to teach this thing to all the others. To your soldiers.”

He should be sobered by that, but the tisane keeps him on an even footing. “So you know that we must be moving on soon.”

“We came here for a reason,” Charles says, and by the time Erik looks up at him he is sitting near the mouth of the cave, near his own smaller fire, turning the thick branch from the beginning of their journey over and over in his hands. “And now that you feel that I have come a long way, we must follow the next reason that you have. Which means setting out from here.”

“It will be difficult to leave, if this is a place where you have known something good.”

“I know.”

“We do not have to leave immediately. We can linger a few days.”

“Days that you will need to locate one ally or another. Don’t tarry on my behalf,” Charles says as he puts one end of the branch in the flames, carefully singeing the coarse-grained wood. “I will keep up. I will stay, and hold fast to my vows.”

He watches Charles work for a while, and then he says, quietly, “And so will I.”


	8. through flames

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we have fight scenes. Please be warned for people with knives and swords who know how to use them!

The tiny freshet that emptied into the cave that they had occupied is also the way out of the hidden place in the rocks. Water gurgling at their feet, the only sound in the gloom that isn’t also the sound of his every breath and the sound of Erik’s.

The dark passage is eased considerably by the constant quiet wind that blows against his face, fresh and cool, and raising a soft song from the rocks beneath them and surrounding them.

Still, he’s glad to follow Erik out into the light when they finally make it out, into the cool blue and rose of dusk. The sky is illuminated by the shivering light of a single star that hangs low over the faraway horizon to the south, but that star does not stay alone for very long.

It seems that with every step Charles takes, the world plunges more and more deeply into a welcoming darkness. It protects him and the man who walks at his side. It conceals the weapons that they carry and the armor that they wear. It makes them both look like fleeting movement, there and gone, shadows passing over the land.

Erik walks at his side, now.

It must mean something, Charles thinks as he watches the Warrior-Prince out of the corner of his eye. Luckily, the ground underfoot is only cracked in a few places, bare and hard and dry: they will leave no footprints here, and they are in no danger of being tripped or injured or hurt.

He remembers being chased, first and foremost: he’s seen too much fear in too many people’s eyes. They feared the way he fought, or they feared the power that lived within him, or they feared him because he was a stray and a wanderer, never comfortable in one place, never happy to be in company.

He also remembers chasing people: days and nights of pursuit. Hunting those who had hunted him first. 

Meeting the Witch-Mistress, meeting the Warrior-Prince: then, too, he had been running after them. They had been following a path that had been laid at their feet, and that path had become his the moment he stopped to help them, the moment he swore himself into service.

The bond thrums softly beneath his skin in time with his heartbeat. 

He should have chafed against restraint of any kind; he should have shied away from saying the words that made him a White Knight. 

There had been no reason for him to repeat those vows.

And yet he’d done exactly that, and he knows what he’s done, for he carries the reminder on his skin. This marking is different; he’d rather wince and forget the scars of his earlier years, and he’d rather everyone saw the dark lines wrapped around his left arm.

*

Charles walks at his side, within arm’s reach, where Erik has always led others, where others have always followed him.

Those who have walked at his side have always been tracing paths that would take them away from him: the woman in white and her beloved; the men and women who have trained him. His mother would have walked with him if she had survived to see him become a leader. He would have wanted to keep his sister and his brother close, if they had both lived to leave with him.

He’d been forced to get used to being alone.

Now someone stands with him, and it is a completely new sensation, and Erik finds himself wanting to lean on that sensation, finds himself holding on to it with every scrap of strength he has.

They camp for the night among half a dozen trees. Wind-blasted bark, sun-scorched branches, and the ground is studded with pebbles and dried leaves, but they are sheltered here, enough that they can even light a small fire.

Erik watches as Charles carefully sets their things together in a neat pile, then leaps up into the nearest tree. He watches him settle in the center of a crook of branches, watches him turn his eyes up to the sky.

Sleep overtakes him as he wonders what Charles sees in the night.

*

Between one dream and the next he wakes abruptly.

The world is lit in harsh sunlight and shadows.

When he glances downward he can see a vague outline of Erik curled up in his blanket, and something in his chest eases at the sight, as though he had been holding his breath unawares.

Only the very top of Erik’s dark hair is visible against the leaf litter and the gnarled roots.

Charles looks down until he’s sure that the Warrior-Prince is safe, and then he gets carefully to his feet, and looks around.

There is a plume of dark smoke rising in the distance, shocking shadow against the too-bright sky.

As he watches, as he strains to see and hear and _feel_ , the wind shifts and suddenly he thinks he might hear screaming. He thinks he might hear a distant cry of pain.

He leans toward the horizon, fear hammering in his blood.

*

Erik wakes to the echoes of a scream that exists only inside his mind.

“Charles,” he whispers as he struggles to sit up.

Something hits the ground nearly on top of him - and instead of reaching for his weapons and lunging forward to protect himself, he gets to his feet and picks Charles up, sets him on his feet, hands him his staff. “Are you all right? What did you see?”

“Fire,” Charles says. “We have to help.”

“And we will,” Erik says. 

As soon as he steps away from the trees he can see the smoke, and he breaks into a run.

The clatter of footsteps tells him that Charles is running, and is still at his side.

*

Just out of shouting distance of the burning village, Charles follows Erik off the path, into the scant cover of an outcropping of rocks. They are hidden from view by rough, low scrub.

“This isn’t an accident or a natural occurrence,” he whispers urgently to the Warrior-Prince.

“No, it’s not. We must be prepared for other dangers,” Erik replies as he strings his bow and checks over his arrows.

“Let me scout,” Charles says. “I can find out what is going on.”

He watches Erik carefully - and Erik does not hesitate. “Go.”

Charles nods, once. He draws one of his knives and begins to creep forward. Slow, careful, deliberate.

He blinks past the smoke and the tears in his eyes, past the driving wind and the dust and the ashes. He grips his weapon tightly. 

He doesn’t look back at Erik, and he doesn’t need to. Worry shivers in the bond.

A handful of tiny houses. People collapsed into heaps. A child cries for its mother, its piercing wail rising higher than the ravenous crackle of the fire. 

Movement, shouting, the thunder of hoofbeats. A woman roughly pushing an old man onto a horse.

Charles slides between a pair of burning walls.

“The town is lost!” the woman cries. “You have to save what you can - tell me where the children are!”

The only response she gets is a shocked silence, is tears running down faces, is immobility.

Charles looks back, once, and leaps to his feet, and he snatches the horse’s reins from the woman. “Go!” he shouts. “Find who you can! I’ll wait!”

“Can you fight?” she screams at him.

He tilts his hand in her direction. Firelight licks at the blade of his knife.

“Good enough,” she says, almost too quietly to be heard, and she darts away.

Charles looks in Erik’s direction, and thinks about him, and says softly, “You need to be here.”

*

Almost as soon as Charles is out of sight Erik feels a pull in his direction, something he’s never felt before. Something that he attributes to the bond that exists between them.

Still, following too quickly in the White Knight’s wake might put him in danger, might put both of them in danger.

Erik fights off the strange urgency, the strange impatience - a struggle, until he gets the distinct impression of Charles looking straight at him.

There are things that should be impossible, but that he knows can be done, if the right forces are brought to bear upon the situation.

In this case, the strength is that which exists between him and Charles, the shared power - and that is what propels him to his feet, that makes him draw the sword from its scabbard at his side.

He runs, and he knows where he’s going even though this is a place that he’s never been to before.

Acrid smoke. Burnt bodies. Erik chokes on a breath clogged with smoke, and throws himself forward - straight into a knot of fighting and screams.

The sword is an extension of his arm. Find the enemy, kill the enemy, move on to the next target. His steps take him around and toward another of the fighters. The length of the knife is something that he knows without having to think about it. He watches the ashen faces around him, dirt-streaked, avaricious, and strikes without remorse, as rapidly as he can.

Someone shouts at him. “By thunder and skies - _Warrior-Prince Erik?_ ”

Erik ducks under the outstretched arm of the man with the knife and takes another thug right in the throat, before he throws himself forward, out of the melee.

The woman standing over him has long dark hair, braided and belled, and her silver eyes are sharp and piercing and all-seeing. There are no weapons in her hands, but she has no need of them, not when each finger ends in a long claw, needle-sharp at the very tip.

He cannot really be surprised that she is here. “Hello, Moira.”

“Emma warned me you’d be about,” she hisses at him. “And she mentioned something about a White Knight. I had not known that I would have the privilege of meeting him so soon! How did you find him?”

“I do not know,” Erik says. “He found me. We found each other.”

“Yes, yes, I suppose I must be familiar with that story,” she says, and she smiles at him, sly and secretive. 

They both watch as Charles takes out the last of his enemies with a kick that cracks loudly across the man’s bloodied face.

“That is that,” Moira announces, and then she slinks over to Charles, looking amused. “Hail, White Knight.”

“You know who I am,” Erik hears Charles say - and then he’s caught in that blue regard, and the light in Charles’s eyes shifts from wariness to curiosity. “I see. You know the Warrior-Prince.”

“Oh, but he did not tell me anything,” Moira says. “I bring you greetings from my beloved. A woman clothed in white.”

“The Witch-Mistress,” Charles says, nodding in understanding. “And you are?”

“My name is Moira.”

“If you must take her hand,” Erik murmurs when he rejoins them, “do so carefully. She is called the Thorn for a reason.”

Charles raises an eyebrow at him, and then at her.

Erik sighs, put-upon, when Moira wiggles one hand in Charles’s direction. The light from the blazing fires catches on her claws. 

“Hail, Thorn,” Charles says at last.

“And now that that’s over,” she says, “this village needs help.”

“We give it gladly,” Erik says. “Tell us what to do.”

*

Charles watches Erik speak to the children as they huddle in the shade of a half-burnt wall. The little ones cluster around him, clutching at the sleeves of his tunic.

He must be speaking to them of reassurance, because the bond is full of courage and gentle cajoling.

A hand on his shoulder pulls him out of his reverie, and he turns around to face Moira and the girl at her side, who is swaying and whose face is mottled with sweat and ash. Bright red hair, roughly chopped off just at her shoulders, jagged fringe falling into her eyes.

“Sit down before you fall down,” Charles begins.

“No,” the girl says, “I can stand. I must stand.”

He offers her his staff, and she clutches gratefully at it, leans heavily on it. “I watched you fight,” she whispers. “I want to do the same.”

“Tell him what you can do,” Moira murmurs. 

“I can fight with many weapons. And with my abilities,” the girl says. “I can make people do whatever I say. I only need to look at them, and think of what I want, and they will do it. I can turn my enemies against each other if I can look one of them in the eyes.”

“That is a great skill,” Charles says quietly.

“You must be going to war, or you wouldn’t be dressed like that,” the girl says. “I want to fight. I was always going to fight. Let me stand with you.”

“The Warrior-Prince is in need of soldiers.” Moira shrugs. “Take her or someone else will.”

Charles nods, once. “Come on.”

“Rachel,” the girl says. “My name is Rachel.”

“I am Charles, and that is Erik,” Charles says. “You will have to swear to him.”

“I will.”


	9. gather

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Parts of this chapter talk about the murder of a family, including young children. Please be warned accordingly.

A small fire. A soft crackle. A sky full of stars. A bright red moon.

Three women around the fire, their faces wreathed in resinous smoke.

Roughly scratched lines in the rocky soil. Instructions. A claw, followed by a branch.

Rachel is a very quick learner. Her eyebrows are pulled together as she learns to read and to write. 

Moira is patient and relentless and steadfast, and Emma whispers every now and then to add more information, new words, new ideas. When she sings the crow’s song, the melody is sad and slow: “One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a wedding, four for a death.”

The next voice that joins in is Charles’s, when he reappears from the back of the cave, where they have stowed their supplies. The rock throws his voice back in strange slurred echoes. “Five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.”

“I don’t like secrets,” Rachel says as she irritably brushes over a mistake in one of her words, and tries to write it again. “Secrets get people killed.”

“That might be a truth, but have a care who hears it,” Emma murmurs. “For that, too, is a secret.”

“Some secrets are death if kept, and some are death if told,” Erik says, and he looks everywhere except at the people in the circle with him.

Even so, he can see the movement of Rachel’s mouth as she sounds out the line, slow and careful, before writing it out. Small, cramped strokes that only last for a moment, because she erases it after Moira nods in approval. 

“And here among us is a secret that cannot be kept,” Emma says after a while, nodding encouragingly in his direction. “What do you need us to do, Warrior-Prince?”

Erik meets her eyes evenly. “If I could leave the rest of you out of this fight, I would. What I plan to do, I must do alone.”

Moira laughs softly. “Warrior-Prince you might be, but you are nothing more than a fool, if you think that is absolutely true.”

“You face a powerful opponent,” Emma says. “It does not matter if he has been diminished by his loss.”

“Do not accuse me of underestimating that man,” Erik growls.

“We are accusing you of overestimating yourself.”

“One sword against an entire citadel.” Charles sounds thoughtful. “It can be done, but slowly. It will wear the attacker out. It will give the enemy time to prepare his defenses.”

“Not good,” Rachel says. “Inefficient. Don’t fight alone.”

It is not the first time that Erik has wished that he could be exasperated by the others. “Five of us against a citadel that has never been taken except by the basest treachery. You will permit me to entertain grave doubts about the whole idea, especially since I will not stoop to using the same tactics myself.”

“Five of us is still better than just one of you - ”

“A citadel,” Erik says right over Rachel, “in whose heart lurks a madman and a murderer. I know him, and I have faced him, and I would not do so again without an army at my back.”

Moira laughs again, and this time she flashes her claws at him. “Silly man! We are not an army, Warrior-Prince. I should think that you already know: we are _more_ than that.” 

“So much more,” Emma says with a smile. “You have us.”

“And you have me.”

Erik looks up. 

Charles is on his feet, and he is smiling, though the expression does not seem to reach his eyes. He looks determined when he taps the vambrace on his left arm, and when he nods to the women. “You will need them, and you will not succeed without me. And here I am.” 

They all look at Rachel when she sweeps the rock clean again and starts drawing. “A citadel? A tower? A palace? That doesn’t matter. I know how to attack. Soldiers to guard the doors, and the doors are at the bottom, and there are only so many doors. Am I right?”

“Yes. Continue,” Emma says, nodding encouragement.

“I only need one soldier, don’t I?” Rachel points to her own eyes. “I only need to take one of them. Perhaps two. I will not be able to hold the doors alone.”

“Emma knows the citadel, so I know it,” Moira says. “Get us inside, and we will clear every path to the top.”

“And once you do that, then _you_ can come in,” Rachel says, poking at Charles’s wrist with the hand that is not drawing. “What can you do?”

“I can do _something_ ,” is Charles’s reply. “I dare not demonstrate here. There is no way of knowing what could happen to this place.”

Erik thinks that Charles might be laughing, now.

Rachel frowns, looking doubtful. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I truly am not,” Charles says.

“Hmph. Well. It’ll be the same thing, anyway, up and up. We get in, we clear out the enemy fighters, we let the Warrior-Prince through, and we watch his back. All the way to the top. What I can’t help you with is the person that you say is waiting at the end of the path.”

Erik watches them all turn expectantly towards him. 

“You must tell us the story,” Emma says after a moment. 

“We do not know all of the details,” Moira says.

“I might be able to help you if I know something,” Charles adds.

Erik closes his eyes and grits his teeth.

No one has heard the complete story.

Now he is about to let go of the secret of his life.

*

Charles wakes when the last branches in the fire fall apart, cracking to pieces and sending up sparks.

He is glad to be awake.

Brief dreams, fleeting dreams, fleeing dreams.

Shouting, stumbling, swords clashing together. 

A woman in shattered armor. Wide open eyes, the last human thing in a ruined face. A thousand wounds slashed into her skin. Blood on the stones where she’d fallen.

A man with salt-and-pepper hair, falling out of a window, hands bound behind his back. A child screaming because the man could not. The sound of waves, and the sounds of breaking, far below.

Children. Three forms huddled together, two older ones flanking the youngest. A broken knife in the girl’s bloodied hands; a torch in the littlest boy’s with the flame guttering so close to his fingers.

Magic made visible, a wan ghostly white, binding all three of them at the wrists and ankles, around their throats and their chests. Imprisoned in power, their very voices suppressed so that they could live.

Struggle. Forced to fight each other. Forced to manifest, and showing nothing.

Charles looks around the cave, and wonders that no one wakes when he can hear his own heart hammering in his ears, loud frightened roar.

The bond, too, trembles, and he casts about for Erik, fighting to keep his fear at bay.

The dreams were merciless, and Charles remembers what the bond showed him, what made the Warrior-Prince stop in the middle of his narrative.

A reason for a low voice, stripped of any and all emotion.

“I could not protect my sister or my brother. They would be forced to kill each other.

“I fought to break the magic that had been forced onto me, because I knew what I had to do for them.

“I killed them. I slit their throats. They could not break free. It had to be done. It was all the mercy I could give them.

“Still I carry their blood on my hands.”

The others had tried to reassure him, and all of them had failed.

Charles remembers trying to take Erik’s hand, and just as vividly remembers Erik pulling away.

Now Erik is nowhere to be found, and Charles throws his blanket on over his shoulders before hurrying toward the mouth of the cave.

Erik is sitting on the slope, hunched over, with his red sword laid over his knees.

“Red for blood,” Charles whispers, sudden terrible understanding.

“For my family’s blood. For the empty graves.” A hollow voice, as of one left bleeding to death. Visible tremors in Erik’s bowed shoulders. “My mother and father in one, and my brother and sister in the other.”

“How long have you been waiting - ” Charles trails off. He knows about the years, like a stone hung around the other man’s neck.

“Too long,” Erik whispers. “So much waiting. So much blood.”

“Not much longer,” Charles whispers as he kneels down next to Erik. “Now you have us. Now you have me.”

“Are you still with me, now that you know?”

“I am still with you _because_ I know.” As he says it Charles reaches out to the bond, and reaches out to Erik, marked hand to marked hand. “I will stand with you, because I know.”

“Tell me your secrets,” Erik demands.

“There is only one,” Charles says, and he leans closer, so he can whisper the words against Erik’s skin. “I was abandoned in a forest. I was cast away. But I lived, and now I know why.

“I lived so that I could come to you.”

Erik meets his eyes, then - bright with unshed tears.

Charles holds him in place with a hand at his throat and one at his shoulder, and touches his lips to the corner of Erik’s mouth, steady gaze.

*

“We march for the sea,” Erik hears himself say the next morning, and the three women look grim and determined and resolute.

Charles simply smiles at him.

Erik remembers, and steps forward, and kisses him. “To the truth,” he whispers.

“To victory,” Charles says.


	10. walk in shadow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter of doubts and fears and nightmares before we plunge into the fight!

Erik looks carefully at the long gash in the skin of Rachel’s forearm, turns it in the direction of the firelight to judge its severity. “Does it cause you pain to move your hand?” he asks.

“Not very much,” is her quiet reply. “Forgive me. I was careless.”

He thinks back to their skirmish, to her erratic footwork, to the careless way in which she swung one of Charles’s knives around. “Let us hope that this is the only price that you will have to pay for that carelessness,” he admonishes as he reaches for the bandages in his pack, as he cleans the wound and binds it, tight and secure. “It will be a different problem if you lose your way while you are fighting for your life.”

“I will do better next time, Warrior-Prince.”

He watches her walk away, and frowns when he sees her limping toward her bedroll. He remembers laying her out several times during their practice.

“No need for you to be gentle with that one,” Moira says from above.

He looks up to where she is perched in the crook of several low-hanging branches. 

Her grin shows too many teeth. “She wants to be a soldier, so you should let her know what that really means.”

“I won’t be cruel,” Erik says absently.

“I didn’t say you would be. All I said was that she’s your soldier.”

“She is.”

He hears rustling, and he doesn’t flinch when she drops right next to him; he watches as she stirs up the fire, and though she looks as though she’s at ease, there is tension in her voice when she speaks again. “Is something wrong with your White Knight, when he fights? There must be a reason why he is asking Emma for help with that. Perhaps he knows that I cannot do anything for him, and so he goes to my beloved. But you must know about it. I would hear the tale.”

Erik sighs and thinks back to the first meeting, and to the many nights of training. “He loses himself,” he says. “It is as if he breaks in the wild energy and in the chaos of it - he becomes aware of his body moving, he knows the moment of every opponent’s death, he protects himself without any difficulty - but he cannot truly be said to be completely in the place where the fight is taking place. He describes it as watching himself from an incredible distance.”

“It would be a good thing, if it weren’t so dangerous as well.”

“He and I have tried to do something about it,” Erik murmurs. The memory of it is as much in his sinews and bones as it is in his mind: the clatter and crash of the two of them, sunk deep into the work of learning each other. Fights that were duels and fights that were not. The two of them stepping in slow, intricate circles. Imagining an enemy, or dueling each other. The whistling sounds of Charles swinging that great gnarled staff of his, and his blank blind eyes. Hands like his knives, and striking just as rapidly.

“You wouldn’t look like that,” Moira observes, “if you’d actually managed to succeed.”

“We did, after a fashion: at least he’s aware of the condition, of its warning signs, now. He did not truly understand what was going on, before this.” Erik stares gloomily into the fire. “He knows that this condition could make him vulnerable, and could put those on his side at risk. Including me.”

“Which must be causing him pain, considering who you are supposed to be to each other.”

“And so it distresses me as well. Can Emma help with that?”

“I don’t know,” Moira says. “I only know that she has met at least one other person who’d had that difficulty.”

“Would that there was some way of speaking with him or her.”

“You can’t.”

Erik stares at her. “Is that person dead.” It’s not a question.

She nods, looking grim. “Yes.”

“A pity.” Erik turns away when something moves in the shadows surrounding their makeshift camp.

It’s only Charles, walking toward him - walking past him, crossing the tiny clearing, forsaking one group of trees for another.

Erik glances in Emma’s direction.

She crosses to Moira’s side and leans against the other woman’s shoulder.

“I will tend to mine,” Moira murmurs after a moment, covering Emma’s eyes with the palm of her hand. “Tend to yours, Warrior-Prince.”

*

He can hear a voice speaking as he plunges into another set of shadows.

The stars are cold and distant, and the moons are nowhere to be seen.

The Witch-Mistress’s words ring hollow in Charles’s mind: “I cannot help you.”

He thinks of the days and nights learning to fight from Erik, and eventually fighting Erik: he can remember every detail, and he can remember the source of every bruise.

But he’d been fighting in the burning village - and he only knows that he used his feet at some point during the battle because he’d had difficulty walking afterwards.

The shadows grow darker with every step.

“White Knight,” he whispers. “White Knight who cannot remember.”

“Why is that important?”

He doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t look over his shoulder. He just keeps walking.

“Charles, why must you remember?”

“I have to _know_ ,” Charles says through gritted teeth. “Should I not be aware of who fights at my side? Should I not know what I am doing, so I know if I am helping or hindering my allies?”

Eventually, he stops, and he feels Erik stop as well. 

“You heard me,” he hears Erik say after a long moment of the wind rustling all around them. “You knew where I was at all times, when you joined me and the Witch-Mistress in battle. I could see you fighting. You knew where we were. _You could remember us._ ”

“...I cannot believe....”

Erik doesn’t let him speak. “You knew where I was when we fought the men who set those houses alight. Just as I knew where you were, with every breath and with every movement.”

“...that was the bond,” Charles says.

“And you need it,” Erik says. “It is what you have been missing.”

“How can you know this?” He whirls, at last, and even in the darkness he can make out the lines in Erik’s face. “How can you _believe_?”

“I just do.”

“If you will walk in my wake and find yourself stopping at your _grave_ \- ”

“Then that is where you will lead me. And I will be content,” Erik says. “Did you hear me, on the night we met? From the moment I was born I have been walking towards my death. Every moment. Every day. Every battle. Every chance that I could have died before coming to that which was foretold. I could have had my throat slit long before I knew what it meant to be a Warrior-Prince. I could have never met you, the White Knight who was my fate. I never stopped walking. 

“ _And neither have you._ So you are here, with me, and we are standing on the edge of the battle. So we are together.”

Charles nearly flinches away when Erik surges forward and seizes both of his hands. “I swore I’d be here, and I am,” he says instead, “and I cannot trust myself to be the White Knight you must have.”

“Then let it suffice that I trust you.” Erik leans in, so close, and Charles cannot breathe and must breathe him in. “I trust you with my life, and with Rachel’s. I trust you with Moira’s life and with Emma’s. They believe. _I_ believe. Let that be enough.”

*

“So we are here,” Erik murmurs, and the seabirds wheel overhead, calling and shrieking.

This time they are approaching the citadel from the coast. Salt-crust on his skin, on his arms, on his feet, everywhere the wind lashes at him, except for the hand that is still tightly entwined in Charles’s.

“It is always a surprise to see these cliffs, though I know of them, and I have climbed them more times than I care to remember,” Emma says, looking torn.

“You _climbed_?” Rachel mutters in disbelief. “Were you going up or down?”

“I’ve hauled her up and I’ve followed her down,” Moira says with an easy grin. “Going down’s more likely to kill, though.”

Rachel swears, once, and then again, and finally trails off, shaking her head.

“It cannot be much different from climbing trees,” Charles says after another long moment.

“If that is what makes you feel better, White Knight, then I will not disillusion you,” is Emma’s reply.

“Enough,” Erik says. “We have little time. Either climb now or never climb at all - the choice is up to each of you. As for me, I’m going up.”

Charles squeezes his hand, hard enough that he thinks he might bruise, and he welcomes the strength of it. “I’ll go. I might be afraid, but I’ll go.”

“We’re going, we’re going,” Moira says.

Erik nods at the others. “Then let’s move.”

*

Erik is well ahead of him and still climbing, a pale shape moving against the dark crumbling rock, and he’s grateful for the pull of the bond, for the pull of Erik’s belief.

Difficult as it is to climb when they have to be ready to fight at every moment, he doesn’t stop.

*

Rachel draws first blood, once they’re on the rocky footpath that winds up to the foundations of the citadel - she catches the eye of a sentry, and he smilingly slits his own throat.

“Thank you,” is all Erik can say. 

She shrugs and looks around carefully. “Where is the entrance?”

“Over there,” Emma says, and she points to a door, almost invisible against the sand and against the rock. 

“That leads into the crypts,” Erik explains.

“How many men?” Rachel asks.

“Not many. It is the levels above that will be heavily guarded.”

“I will not say that this will be easy, but at least I can say I’m going to do everything I can.”

“As will we,” Moira says.

“Thank you,” he says again, as the three women march off.

Instead of starting onto the path, instead of following the others, Charles steps away and faces him completely, and then he smiles and says, “Sing, Warrior-Prince.”

“Only if you will sing with me, White Knight.”

“I do not know any songs of war,” Charles says, and his hands are nearly too fast to follow as he draws his knives - and then taps the flat side of one of the blades against his own left wrist. “Only the song that comes with the flower that I wear.”

“That is the song we share,” Erik says, and he summons his sword.


	11. we are blades

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be warned for lots of fighting and the on-screen death of the main antagonist.

Shouts in the corridor ahead, and shifting shadows. 

Erik takes a long step to the side and then ducks, and there is a sword moving slowly across the space where his head should have been.

Slow, he thinks, and he wants to shake his head. There’s no time for that. He turns around as fast as he can, catches a glimpse of breastplate and greaves, and he lunges forward. 

His sword bites deeply into muscle, scrapes against bone, and he completes the form, and the man who hits the stones at his feet is frozen in his death between a desperate breath and a piercing cry.

Erik turns back and keeps moving. Blood drips in his wake. There are too many enemies here, and there are too many opportunities to be caught unawares. There’s no time to pause and there’s no time to think. The fight is here, and the fight is all.

Toward the intersection of three corridors and he stays well out of the way as Moira leaps and laughs and dances. Torchlight, guttering, as she stabs a man in the throat. She kills another man by driving a talon into each eye - then she shakes the corpse off her hand and kicks it aside. 

“Warrior-Prince,” she says, when she finally takes a moment to catch her breath. 

“I’ve cleared the corridor behind me,” Erik says.

“One less problem to deal with.”

“The others?”

“I sent Rachel on ahead,” Moira says, and she points down the left-hand corridor. “I saw her go around the corner.”

“Watch my back,” Erik says.

“Of course I will, though I’ll only rest easy once you can get to your actual task.”

“Which is?”

Moira throws her head back and laughs, and the sound of it echoes harshly, again and again, around the dead bodies heaped at her feet. “Watching my beloved’s back. You’ve done it before, and I think that you will have to do it again.”

Erik doesn’t answer; instead he steps carefully up the hallway that Moira had indicated. 

He turns the corner, listening and waiting, and runs into half a dozen men in ranks, standing stiffly at attention. They are still and silent, and it is almost as if none of them are breathing.

He’s tense, he’s waiting for someone to draw, and then Rachel steps back into view and she’s smiling - tense and strained around the edges, but she is smiling, and the men are clustered around her, as though to protect her. “They are mine, Warrior-Prince,” she says after a moment. “Mine, and so they are yours.”

“You can give them orders? You can make them do things?”

“Do you wish a demonstration?” Rachel smiles and taps the armored shoulder of one of the men. “What were your orders when you were sent down here?” she asks, sweetly.

Erik can feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

“We were called by the master of the citadel, my lady,” the soldier says in a calm and controlled voice. “We were told about the people who were attempting to attack. We were prepared for an army. We did not expect five fighters.”

“Thank you,” Rachel says. “And now they will not expect their own soldiers turning against them. Give us your orders, Warrior-Prince. We will see them carried out. I will take more men with me as I find them or need them.”

“How many,” Erik asks carefully, “can you control? How many can you force to follow you?”

“I don’t know,” she says after a moment’s thought. “I’ve never tried to find out.”

“Then we will leave you with these six for now - do not take any more unless you must,” Erik says. “Go and fetch Moira and have her lead you to Emma; the three of you must be together when we start going up. I want to find my White Knight.”

“He went that way, sir,” one of the soldiers says, pointing further down the corridor. 

“I’m going after him.”

“Then we’ll see you shortly,” Rachel says, before she turns to the soldiers gathered around her. She is a small flame, bright red against the dark and scratched armor, but she is in command, and the men form up on her and march away in her wake.

Leaving Erik to search for Charles.

*

He can almost remember how he got here, Charles thinks as he looks at the trail of dead bodies that he’s left in his wake.

Perhaps Rachel might have had something to do with it: he’d been protecting her, hadn’t he, while she was taking over some of the soldiers? He remembers holding a soldier at knifepoint, remembers her squaring up to the man and smiling at him. Looking him full in the eyes, until the man blinked and smiled back and said, “Peace, White Knight. I follow my lady.”

He remembers Rachel gathering five or six soldiers and then - voices coming from behind.

That was when he’d left her.

Blood drips down his shoulder. Only some of it is his own. The blades of his knives are still running red. 

He looks at the men and women, and he can almost remember every killing thrust. He’d been surprised to find them fighting in little to no armor - but they’d been fast, and vicious. He’d fought and felt that he was on the run and that he was dancing. 

Eventually, the knives had slid home, both blades working - he’d been careful with every thrust. It wouldn’t have done to leave someone half-dead - it would’ve been dangerous.

So Charles remembers every killing stroke. He remembers holding against the attackers for fear that they’d rush Rachel and break her hold over her soldiers.

Now there are footsteps coming toward him from the direction in which she’d been heading, and Charles takes a deep breath, and braces himself for another fight.

Instead Erik comes around the corner. There’s a moment of stunned silence, and then he says, “Hail, White Knight.”

“Hail, Warrior-Prince,” is his answer. 

“This is your handiwork?” Erik asks, gesturing at the dead.

“Yes. I was watching Rachel’s back.”

“You seem to have done an excellent job of it,” Erik says.

“And Rachel? Is she all right?” Charles asks.

“Yes. I’ve sent her and her - ah - _escort_ on to Moira, and told them both to find Emma. I came here to find you. It is almost time to climb up into the tower.”

“And for that I must be with you,” Charles says, and he nods in understanding. “Here I am. Lead the way.”

“I will, but first - ”

Charles doesn’t step back when Erik moves into his personal space, doesn’t flinch away. He does the opposite: he steps closer, and he takes Erik’s hand and holds it over his own heart. “I’m here.”

“Do you remember this fight?” Erik asks, and he sounds worried.

Charles nods, once, and then rises briefly on his toes to brush a kiss against the corner of the other man’s mouth. “I remember more of this one. Not all of it. But I remember why I did it, and pieces of how.”

“We will have to be content with that for now.” Erik kisses him on his forehead, and whispers, “Are you ready?”

“No, but I will follow you,” Charles says. “I will go anywhere you ask me to go.”

“I do not want you to go anywhere. I only want you to be at my side.”

Charles smiles. “Then that is where you will find me.”

They cannot hold hands when they start walking, because of the weapons that they are carrying.

But they walk side by side, and their shoulders brush with each step, and Charles can almost hear the bond singing between them.

*

Step after bloodied step.

He’s climbed these stairs before. He’s run up these steps and he’s fallen down them.

He has to walk up and watch every step, because the red staining the stone is slippery and dangerous, and there does not seem to be any end to that dark stream in sight.

Over the rush of flames he can hear quiet and insistent laughter and the measured tramp of soldiers’ boots.

There is one more sound behind him: soft, even breathing.

Erik looks over his shoulder.

Charles is going up the stairs backwards, but he seems much more surefooted and at ease, for all that he watches every shadow warily, and for all that he’s never been here before.

“Step aside,” Emma calls from above, and Erik flattens himself against the wall.

A charred corpse rolls down the stairs.

“Landing,” Rachel says, and a man’s voice answers: “Clear.”

“Come on up, Warrior-Prince,” Moira says.

“Charles,” Erik murmurs, and he gets a quiet affirmative as they pass the others and step out onto the floor. 

At the far end he can see the end of a purple runner.

“We’re more than halfway up,” Erik says when the others gather around him.

“How far to the top?” Rachel asks.

“Not far.”

“Have we cleared out all of the soldiers?” Moira asks. “Because I would have expected _more_ guards and not less. And we barred the doors at the foot of the tower. They won’t be getting up here any time soon.”

“Let me help you with that,” someone says.

A memory stirs, and Erik braces himself against the wall, and tells the others to do the same: “Hold on to something.”

“What is he _doing,_ ” Rachel begins, but she does not finish the sentence.

Erik turns to his White Knight.

As Charles closes his eyes that pulse from the forest begins again, far more powerful here in a place of stones.

Where the trees had flourished and put out flowers and borne fruit, however, what seems to be the exact opposite seems to be at work here.

As Erik watches, one after the other, the dead bodies scattered all around them wither away and then crumble to fine dark dust, silent and sudden.

It is as if something huge and invisible is walking around them, and then down, and down, until Erik thinks the tower itself must be shaking apart beneath that relentless force.

He grits his teeth and reaches out on the bond for Charles’s thoughts.

“So much fear,” the White Knight whispers. “Even at the bottom they are full of loathing.”

“I am not afraid of you, Charles,” Erik says.

He gets a blank-eyed smile for that.

And then the great trembling pulse of Charles’s power is gone, as suddenly as it had appeared.

“ _Now_ there are no more soldiers, and we are safe,” Charles says, laughing even as he half-falls to his knees.

Erik lunges to catch him.

Charles is still smiling even as he settles heavily into Erik’s arms. “I only need to rest a moment,” he says, so Erik holds him close.

*

He can hear the steady beat of Erik’s heart, and he can hear low voices nearby, three women talking: “And now there is just one more problem.”

“Yes, the Warrior-Prince’s revenge, but what does he need to _do_?”

“I would imagine that for him revenge has to do with that sword of his.”

“Are there any rules, any rituals?”

A new voice - a familiar voice - cuts through the questions and the grim answers: “The man at the top of this tower doesn’t deserve them.”

Charles breathes in, and opens his eyes - the world spins sickeningly around him, makes him reach out to clutch at warm skin, and a calloused hand wraps around his questing fingers.

“Tell us what we must be ready for,” he half-whispers. Tension cracks around the edges of his words and of his thoughts, weighs on the bond. “What can that man do?”

“I can answer that question, if the Warrior-Prince will not speak of it.” 

“Witch-Mistress,” Charles says.

“Yes, it’s me. We are here. Our enemy has the ability to absorb the force of whatever blow is directed against him, and then to use that force against his attacker. The more times he is struck, the stronger he gets.”

“I mean to hold him down and cut his heart out,” Erik growls. “It’s the only way to make sure he dies.”

“I can try to pin him in place.” Bright red hair: their new companion. The girl, Rachel. 

“Not good enough.” Darkly gleaming talons and silver eyes. Moira. “If he breaks free from your ability, then we will have to think of something else. We cannot knock him unconscious with a fist, with the flat of a blade, with the butt end of a spear - what other weapons do we have?”

Charles stirs, then, and struggles to unfasten the vambrace on his left arm.

“We still have the element of surprise,” Erik says. “He doesn’t know about Charles.”

“He doesn’t know you have a White Knight,” Emma echoes. “He knows me and he knows Moira, and he will attempt to kill us first.” She turns toward Rachel. “That means you, too.”

“Like I said, I’ll try to get him, and if I can’t - then I can still fight,” Rachel says.

“It’s all the strategy we have,” Moira says. “It’s all we can do.”

Charles shakes his head violently. 

“You disagree, White Knight,” Emma says.

Charles looks around the circle, solemn, determined. “There is another way.” 

*

Erik is used to battle, used to ferocity and swiftness and everything coming undone at the last moment, used to the unexpected.

He knows that he can’t struggle, knows that to look to either side - or to the ceiling - is to give the game away.

It is easy for him to bare his teeth. He is not smiling. He is determined, and he is drowning in hatred.

Old milky eyes light up with avarice and anger. Shaking steps, slowly drawing nearer.

Erik doesn’t flinch back when the slap comes, and he doesn’t cry out when his teeth cut into the inside of his cheek.

“Where is your White Knight, if you were foretold to be a King?” the old man says, quavering, mocking. 

It’s perfect. It’s right. There is a shadow moving rapidly past the throne, and coming up on the old man; there is a soft _thud_. 

And then everything happens: Erik surges to his feet and draws the knife hidden in his sleeve. One long step forward, and the blade meets little resistance when he slides it into his enemy’s heart, point to hilt in one swift stroke.

“You can’t kill me that easily,” the old man gurgles, blood dripping from his mouth.

“I know. And that is why I am not the only one killing you,” Erik says.

Something emerges from the old man’s throat, a glittering piece of silver.

“Erik is not alone,” he hears Charles whisper. “He never was. And now he never will be. I have staked my life on it.”

The terrible understanding that dawns in the old man’s eyes transforms him - rage suddenly turned into absolute fear, a fear that only grows when Charles reaches past him and touches Erik’s shoulder.

The old man looks at Charles’s left arm, at the markings on it, and begins to struggle - impaling himself further on the two blades.

Erik smiles and reaches for Charles with his right hand, so the old man can see the identical black spiral.

“This cannot be,” the old man groans.

“It was and it is,” Erik says, and now he smiles as he watches the life flee from those hated eyes.

The silence that falls is brief but profound, and it is broken by Emma whispering behind him: “Hail to the White Knight. Hail to the King.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're still here, then there's one more chapter to go, and hopefully it will make all of these others worth the wait :)
> 
> [TL;DR: next up - sexy times!]


	12. final vows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like I said: in this chapter we have sexy times and feels. Hope you like it.

He’d expected ceremony of some kind, and he’d expected resistance. He’d expected soldiers to come in, demanding to avenge their former leader. That was the way of the world that he knew all too well, a world of death and of blood: a world in which powers and loyalties shifted and changed and someone always had to pay a price, and the price was always far too much for what was gained or for what was lost.

But after Rachel sends away the men under her control, with a message to the remaining armed forces scattered throughout the citadel and the town, the only thing that comes back is what seems to be an acquiescent silence.

The old ruler’s blood has gone cold on his knives - the one in his hand and its twin in Erik’s - when Rachel and Moira hurriedly leave the throne room through a side door and return just as quickly.

There is a small casket in Rachel’s hands, dark wood and black crystal, seemingly of a piece with the ornate seat behind them. “Moira says this belongs to you,” she says as she opens it.

Tucked into the white cloth inside the box is a plain silver circlet, unornamented at first glance, without any decoration or gems or arches.

And then Moira reaches for the circlet and carefully lifts it out. Now Charles can see the design in the metal: one single embossed knot flanked by two tiny red gems.

“It does not seem like much,” Emma says, suddenly, still speaking quietly.

“But it is something important, or we have made it out to be that,” is Erik’s subdued response. “At least, it is something that men and women have killed for, and have died for.”

“If you wish to wear this now, you must speak with your White Knight first.” 

Charles looks up. “What must I do?”

He lets Erik draw him aside.

As Charles looks over his shoulder, Rachel walks up to the dais on which the throne is placed and sits down, while Moira tugs on Emma’s wrist, and pulls her into a brief embrace.

He’s led to one of the tall, narrow windows. The wind soughs and sighs at him, and the seabirds wheel and call, endless waves below.

“I could not have come to this place without you,” Erik suddenly says, “and I could not have won without your help. I am King, now, or I will be when I put the coronet on.”

Charles nods. “I think that you will make a good ruler. You bear your power carefully, so carefully, because you remember the pain and the hardship of it.”

“And many a King has fallen because he or she has lost sight of where he or she has been, what he or she has seen and known and suffered, in search of the power and of the rank and of that coronet.” When Erik turns away he suddenly looks careworn: the lines in his face are deep and shadowed, though they only appear for a moment. “I would do everything that I could so that I would never forget.”

“And I would help you, if I could,” Charles says.

“You can, and that is why I wished to speak to you,” Erik says. “You have helped me fulfill my quest and that means that I must offer to release you from your vows as a White Knight. It is custom, you see - ” 

“I do not care very much for custom.” Charles smiles, and looks away, but reaches for Erik’s hand all the same. “And I remember swearing that I would be yours to the end of my days. So I will not leave you, and you will not send me away. You will be my King, and I will be your White Knight.”

Understanding dawns in Erik’s eyes, in his slow gentle smile. “...Thank you.”

Moving away from him is difficult, but Charles does it all the same, and he bows to the others before he holds his hands out. “May I have the casket?”

“Have you spoken to him?” Moira asks.

“I have given him an answer,” Charles says. 

“Good,” Emma says, and she rises to her feet. “We would bear witness, if you permit it.”

He nods, and she leads the others forward, and they gather around Erik, who flashes a brief smile and gets down carefully on one knee when he sees the box in Charles’s hands.

“It is fitting that you should receive your coronet from your White Knight,” Emma says in Erik’s direction.

Following Emma’s instructions, Charles takes the silver band in both hands and turns it so that the device of the knot and its jewels is facing him.

He can hear Erik whispering under his breath. 

There is devotion in the bond, and determination. A promise to the dead, and promises to the living.

When Erik looks up at him, Charles smiles, and carefully lowers the coronet onto his head, until it’s sitting just above Erik’s brows.

“Hail, King Erik. Long and well may you rule,” Moira says.

Erik nods, grave and sober, and gets to his feet. “Let it be known that I am King and that I shall rule to the best of my ability,” he says, “and let it be known that I in turn will be ruled by the wise counsel and good guidance of my allies and of my White Knight.”

*

Though he was born in this house, he’s spent too many years sleeping beneath the stars, or in some makeshift shelter, or in too many caves and crevices, by too many rivers and ruins.

The whirl of the world here is the sound of the waves, the sound of far-off song, melancholy and sweet celebration. Light at the foot of the citadel. The traditional greeting and offering to the new ruler: a torch lit by each family, to burn throughout the night, and then ceremonially extinguished in the next morning’s sea.

In the end, he cannot get comfortable in his bed of soft cushions and warm blankets; he throws his own old cloak on over his sleeping clothes and makes his way out of his chambers.

The warmth of the bond shows him that he is not the only one awake, and it leads him up into the tower, higher, to a refuge from the gray and from the stone and from the salt.

The dust lies thick on the steps, only very recently disturbed. He follows the trail left behind by bare feet.

The stairs end at a door that yields soundlessly and easily to his touch.

A starless night. The red moon is bright and low, like a ripe fruit, and for a moment Erik gives in to the urge to reach out for it. All he catches in his fingers is its bright rays, is the shadow that precedes him as he walks toward the other shadow standing atop the tower.

Like him, Charles is wrapped in a cloak, watching the waves as they push to the shore and pull away. The restless relentless wind runs rough fingers through his dark hair, and as Erik watches Charles blinks and dashes stray strands out of his eyes, slight graceful movement.

“I could not sleep,” Charles offers when Erik closes the distance between them. 

“I know,” Erik says. “I feel the same way. I have been out in the world for far too long.”

“Spent my entire life running, through snow and flame and pain. I bear the scars of too many injuries. Now I am offered medicine and healing. It is an entirely new thing to me.”

Erik eyes him, concerned. “What ails you?”

“Knife wound,” is Charles’s reply. “I took it while I was watching Rachel’s back. I had to fight three and four others at the same time, and I was not always fast enough to defend.”

Erik watches Charles reach for a pocket in his cloak, and nods when he recognizes the small bottle. “Elder and sage oil. That will help keep the wound clean, and it will prevent you from scarring too much.”

There are clouds in the night sky now, passing over the red moon, wreathing the two of them in shadows.

“What is keeping you awake, my King?” Charles asks, eventually. “Do you worry about your lands, or your people?”

“I worry about my borders,” Erik says. “The other kingdoms have been quiet out of fear of the old ruler. Now they will know that he has been replaced, and that will mean that they will soon attempt to test me.”

“A small realm you have, and an important one.”

“So it has always been, and so it always will. I do not control all of the sea; only this part, which is important enough.” Erik sighs. “I wish my parents were alive. My father knew of ships and of naval warfare, and my mother knew how to draw people together, how to make them work with each other.”

“I know nothing of ships,” Charles says, “but it seems to me that you have inherited your mother’s strength.”

“Speak to me of truth,” Erik says. “Tell me what I _need_ to hear, not what I want to hear.”

Warmth from shoulder to hip, and he looks over as Charles settles closer. When he puts his arm around Charles, Charles smiles and turns his head a little, so he can press a kiss against his shoulder.

“This is something you both need and want to hear,” Charles says when the red moon retreats behind the clouds again. “You led me and Emma and Moira and Rachel up the cliffs - you were encouraging, and you were steadfast. You set an example that we wanted to follow. That we _had_ to follow. That is leadership.”

Erik kisses the top of Charles’s head. “Have a care, White Knight,” he murmurs, “I could get used to you reprimanding me if you will always do it so sweetly.”

Charles laughs, and Erik smiles - and the smile grows when Charles leans up for a kiss.

Suddenly there is something trembling in the scant few spaces between them, something heated and strange and _good_ , and Erik almost pulls back in shock when Charles suddenly groans and seizes his hands, when Charles holds on to him as if he’s drowning.

His kiss is overwhelming, burning brightly, hot enough to burn - and Erik wants that, wants to be burned, sudden fierce need that twists in his heart like a knife and he doesn’t want to take it out.

Charles pulls away and the wind whistles between them, suddenly cold, and Erik watches him shiver, and feels helpless. 

“I - I want,” Charles begins, and then he shakes his head and looks away. 

“Tell me,” Erik says, and he’s taken aback by his own words, fierce and rough and needing.

The waves are louder than Charles’s whispered words. “I haven’t - I - you - _Erik it’s you_ \- ”

Erik draws in a shaky breath. “Have you been with another before?” 

“It’s been a long time,” is Charles’s reply. “I’m not afraid of you, you would never hurt me - ”

He nearly rocks back again. “You trust me, Charles. You trust me that much?”

“Yes, Erik,” Charles says, a nearly soundless sigh. “I trust you.”

He wants to fall and to fly and to hold Charles close, all at once, and all Erik does is kiss him again, groaning when Charles opens up to him, sweetly demanding.

Down, down Erik goes, to his knees, and he pulls Charles with him. The stones beneath their knees are salt-sharp and wind-smoothed, but that doesn’t seem to stop them from kissing. He can’t get enough of Charles’s kiss, of the hitch and the sob in his breath.

He wraps his arms around Charles’s shoulders, pulls him closer and closer still. Charles’s temple and throat and cheek are warm, when he scatters kisses over the skin and the curve of his bones.

“Touch me,” a voice whispers, and Erik risks a glance at Charles - and cannot look away.

Blue eyes ringed by moonlight, wide wide open, framed by hot skin and soft hair.

“Beautiful,” Erik says, helplessly, and then he reaches for the clasp holding Charles’s cloak closed. “May I?”

Charles nods, still wide-eyed.

Thin sleeping tunic. Translucent sleeves. He can see Charles’s left arm and the marking that binds the two of them together. He follows his impulse; he raises that wrist to his mouth, pushes the cloth away, and presses the gentlest of open-mouthed kisses to Charles’s skin.

“You?” Charles breathes.

Erik can see his hands shaking as he pulls off his own layers.

He hears Charles make a small sound when he’s bare-chested. He doesn’t feel the chill of the night; he’s too warmed by the other man’s presence, by his open regard.

“So many scars,” Charles says.

“I healed,” Erik says. “I’m here, with you.”

Charles smiles and reaches for him, traces his fingers over shoulder and rib and the beat of his heart, and he can feel himself shiver, and he doesn’t look away.

The reward for his patience is Charles swaying forward for another kiss, is Charles’s hands catching his, pulling him forward. Charles whispering in his ear. “Touch me.”

Bare skin slick with sweat despite the breezes, as they crash on the shores of each other, again and again. Charles responds so sweetly to every kiss and to every touch - even when Erik’s hand strays down, and toward his hip.

Charles freezes, but only for a moment, and when he pulls away from the kiss he whispers, “Please.”

Erik nods, once, and then he gets back to his feet, ignoring the soft sound of Charles’s discontent. 

He spreads their cloaks out on the stones. He goes back to Charles and helps him to his feet - and then he lifts Charles into his arms.

Charles laughs, surprised and amused and cut off: “Don’t - ” His smile is bright in the shrouded darkness.

Erik carefully strips away the last of Charles’s clothes. Laid out on the cloth, he cannot be still. He arches up, beckoning, and Erik reaches for him. He tastes of sweat and of salt, and he gasps so sweetly when Erik marks him with teeth and tongue - gentle, so gentle, nothing that would break the skin, but there will be bruises come the sun, stark against pale scarred skin.

Down, and Erik grasps Charles’s cock at the base, watches Charles shift anxiously beneath him, pinned down and pleading.

Erik tastes him, then, sharp musk on his tongue.

The bond jolts and shivers, and he cannot feel it, because he is too busy listening to Charles say his name, over and over and breaking with every repetition: _“Erik.”_

He draws it out as long as he dares, until he’s drunk on the taste of Charles, until he knows just how Charles’s blood pulses beneath his skin. Until finally Charles curls his hands into fists and bangs on his shoulders - Erik smiles, because he wants to bear Charles’s bruises as well.

Until Charles is begging for him: “Please, Erik.”

He moves his hand and his mouth in concert, and Charles cries out, high and breathless and wordless.

Erik drinks him down, and can’t get enough.

Eventually he looks up to Charles looking pleased and shocked - and concerned. “Charles?”

“What about you?”

Erik takes a deep breath. He’s been ignoring his need in favor of Charles’s pleasure, but now he can’t think past the demanding pulse in his blood, the need that rips at his skin. “I - you - ”

The first response he gets is a sly, soft smile - and then Charles is rising from the stones, is reaching for his discarded clothes. He lets out a soft cry of triumph - and then something is flying towards Erik.

“Elder and sage oil,” he says, once again. And: “Charles. What are you doing?”

“I only said that it’s been a long time,” is the amused reply. “Not that I don’t know what to do.”

Erik watches, fighting back the urge to just push Charles down and rut against him, as Charles unfastens his trousers and pulls them away. 

“I want you,” Charles says, once he looks back up from Erik’s cock. “You, Erik.”

He gives in, then, and pulls Charles closer, until Charles is sitting in his lap. They exchange kisses again - some rough, some soft. He bites gently at Charles’s lower lip, and in retaliation Charles nips hard at the corner of his mouth.

Between their wandering hands they manage to open the bottle of oil; Charles pulls away to pour some of it over Erik’s hand.

“Say it again,” Erik says as he draws slick fingers down the curve of Charles’s back. “Say you want me.”

“Please have me,” Charles says. “Please.”

He almost falls into that needy whisper, glorious conflagration on the bond, but he forces himself to go slowly. The harsh rasp of Charles’s breathing as he’s breached and opened up is its own reward, his rich voice falling apart into wordless pleading.

“Now,” they say together, and Erik lifts Charles up and carefully pulls him back down, down, sweet slow drag that burns at Erik’s mind - burns it completely away as he begins to thrust up.

Charles pulls at his hands, at his shoulders, demanding encouraging _needing_ -

Drunk on desire and wanting more, Erik seizes Charles’s hips in a hard grip and keeps going, until they’re both yelling into the night, until they push each other toward the dark heights of glory and then there’s nowhere to go but over that edge.

He thinks he might hear Charles laughing - he wants to respond, he wants to say something, but pleasure overtakes him and leaves him used up and cut to pieces.

When he comes to, the red moon is falling into the sea, and Charles is playing with his hair. 

He reaches up and kisses the palms of Charles’s hands.

“You’re mine,” Charles says after a moment. “My King, and mine alone.”

“You are my White Knight, and my shadow, and mine,” Erik says, and they seal their vows with a kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, all of this came out of, and is basically the expansion for, my five-sentences ficlet [a circle of protection](http://ninemoons42-five-sentences.tumblr.com/post/47013230463/assuming-that-this-is-an-actual-production-photo).
> 
> Massive MASSIVE thanks go to Afrocurl for holding my hand and asking questions and being awesome and encouraging.


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